“A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.”
―
Barack Obama
“anger's a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become and organiser. Well adjusted people find more relaxing work”
―
Barack Obama
“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.”
―
Barack Obama
“the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;”
―
Barack Obama
“This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it.”
―
Barack Obama
“It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.”
―
Barack Obama
“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”
―
Barack Obama
“well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government”
―
Barack Obama
“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
―
Barack Obama
“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”
―
Barack Obama
“Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.”
―
Barack Obama
“I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.”
―
Barack Obama
“Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.
―
Barack Obama
“if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism
―
Barack Obama
“right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin.”
―
Barack Obama
