“If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.” Patronage,”
―
Barack Obama
“And that’s the work of your generation. As long as more walls still stand...We’ll need more of you, young people, who imagine the world as it should be; who knock down walls; who knock down barriers; who imagine something different and have the courage to make it happen. The courage to bring communities together, to make even the small impossibilities a shining example of what is possible.”
―
Barack Obama
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But”
―
Barack Obama
“It's in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.”
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Barack Obama
“What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim”
―
Barack Obama
“We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.”
―
Barack Obama
“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works”
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Barack Obama
“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
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Barack Obama
“For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper- that makes this country work.”
―
Barack Obama
“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
―
Barack Obama
“doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”
―
Barack Obama
“stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.
Barack Obama
At the Lincolm Memorial concert on National Mall in Washington, January 18, 2009, two days before his inauguration as US President.”
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Barack Obama
“We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.”
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Barack Obama
“The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.”
―
Barack Obama
