“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
“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
―
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
“There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.”
―
Barack Obama
“In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.”
―
Barack Obama
“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”
―
Barack Obama
“Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”
―
Barack Obama
“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”
―
Barack Obama
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth
―
Barack Obama
“the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
―
Barack Obama
“Churches won't work with you, though, just out of the goodness of their hearts. They'll talk a good game-a sermon on Sunday, maybe, or a special offering for the homeless. But if push comes to show, they won't really move unless you can show them how it'll help them pay their heating bill.”
―
Barack Obama
“We went down into the dungeons where the captives were held. There was a church above one of the dungeons -- which tells you something about saying one thing and doing another. (Applause.) I was -- we walked through the "Door Of No Return." I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.”
―
Barack Obama
“Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.”
―
Barack Obama
“well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government”
―
Barack Obama
“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
―
Barack Obama
