“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
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Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy." President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books”
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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.”
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Barack Obama
“We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”
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Barack Obama
“People with disabilities deserve the chance to build a life for themselves in the communities where they choose to live.”
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Barack Obama
“We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect.”
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Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
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Barack Obama
“They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.”
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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 stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
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Barack Obama
“perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.”
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Barack Obama
“Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.”
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Barack Obama
“We may come from different places and have different stories, but we share common hopes, and one very American dream.”
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Barack Obama
“There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
―
Barack Obama
