“We are made for this moment, and we will seize it-so long as we seize it together.”
―
Barack Obama
“I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help we diminish ourselves.”
―
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
“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”
―
Barack Obama
“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”
―
Barack Obama
“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”
―
Barack Obama
“If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works”
―
Barack Obama
“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”
―
Barack Obama
“The most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
―
Barack Obama
“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”
―
Barack Obama
“in a climate of constant technological change.”
―
Barack Obama
“Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.”
―
Barack Obama
“Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.”
―
Barack Obama
“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”b”
―
Barack Obama
“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens”
―
Barack Obama
