“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
“Change will not happen if we wait for another person or another time. We are the person that we are waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
―
Barack Obama
“Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power
―
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
“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”
―
Barack Obama
“I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”
―
Barack Obama
“We are the change we have been waiting for.”
―
Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
―
Barack Obama
“The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
―
Barack Obama
“We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself...”
―
Barack Obama
“All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we've done to make so many children's hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass - what values we must live by.”
―
Barack Obama
“And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.”
―
Barack Obama
“In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”
―
Barack Obama
“We are made for this moment, and we will seize it-so long as we seize it together.”
―
Barack Obama
