“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
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Barack Obama
“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”
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Barack Obama
“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”
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Barack Obama
“And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words -yes, we can.”
―
Barack Obama
“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
―
Barack Obama
“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening
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Barack Obama
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
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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.”
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Barack Obama
“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
―
Barack Obama
“How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?
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Barack Obama
“I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.”
―
Barack Obama
“Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”
―
Barack Obama
“No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.”
―
Barack Obama
