“I've got daughters. Nine years old and six years old. First of all, I'm gonna teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them PUNISHED with a baby.”
―
Barack Obama
“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.”
―
Barack Obama
“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models.”
―
Barack Obama
“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”
―
Barack Obama
“Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”
―
Barack Obama
“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”
―
Barack Obama
“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
―
Barack Obama
“in a climate of constant technological change.”
―
Barack Obama
“Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land: enough! This moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On Nov. 4, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough.”
―
Barack Obama
“The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.”
―
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
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”
―
Barack Obama
“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
―
Barack Obama
