“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
―
Barack Obama
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
―
Barack Obama
“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”
―
Barack Obama
“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”
―
Barack Obama
“Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.”
―
Barack Obama
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”
―
Barack Obama
“What I could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics"
―
Barack Obama
“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe.”
―
Barack Obama
“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”
―
Barack Obama
“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”
―
Barack Obama
“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”
―
Barack Obama
“For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”
―
Barack Obama
“I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.”
―
Barack Obama
