“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
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Barack Obama
“I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.”
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Barack Obama
“We don't ask you to believe in our ability to bring change, rather, we ask you to believe in yours.”
―
Barack Obama
“There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: 'Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to you own facts.”
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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.”
―
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
“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”
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Barack Obama
“And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.”
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Barack Obama
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
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Barack Obama
“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”
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Barack Obama
“We will not apologize for oour way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”
―
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
“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
―
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
