“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”
―
Barack Obama
“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.”
―
Barack Obama
“We will outstretch the hand if you unclench your fist. ”
―
Barack Obama
“It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain top and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can!”
―
Barack Obama
“This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man's power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man.”
―
Barack Obama
“It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”
―
Barack Obama
“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”
―
Barack Obama
“The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.”
―
Barack Obama
“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
―
Barack Obama
“I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task.”
―
Barack Obama
“As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy.
―
Barack Obama
“Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us...A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.”
―
Barack Obama
“You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”
―
Barack Obama
