“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
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Barack Obama
“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
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Barack Obama
“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....”
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Barack Obama
“They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.”
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Barack Obama
“The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.”
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Barack Obama
“He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think—the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised.”
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Barack Obama
“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”
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Barack Obama
“What's happened here, Sayid? There never used to be such begging."
"You are right," he said. "I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, 'You are poor.' So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn't have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”
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Barack Obama
“But that’s part of what makes America wonderful, is we always had this nagging dissatisfaction that spurs us on. That’s how we ended up going west, that’s how we--“I’m tired of all these people back east; if I go west, there’s going to be my own land and I’m not going to have to put up with this nonsense, and I’m going to start my own thing, and I’ve got my homestead.” ...It is true, though, that that restlessness and that dissatisfaction which has helped us go to the moon and create the Internet and build the Transcontinental Railroad and build our land-grant colleges, that those things, born of dissatisfaction, we can very rapidly then take for granted and not tend to and not defend, and not understand how precious these things are.”
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Barack Obama
“it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
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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”
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Barack Obama
“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
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Barack Obama
“Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.”
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Barack Obama
“Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.”
―
Barack Obama
