“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
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Barack Obama
“What Washington Needs is Adult Supervision.”
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Barack Obama
“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
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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.”
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Barack Obama
“Just a negative attitude, you understand. growing up in alt geld, i'd soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. see, the folks you're working with got the same problem, even though they dont realize it yet. they spend half they lives worrying about what the white folks think. start blaming themselves for the shit they see every day, thinking they cant do no better till the white man decides they all right. but deep down they know that ain't right. they know what this country has dont to their momma, their daddy, their sister. so the truth is they hate their folks, but they cant admit it to themselves, keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. waste a lot of energy that way. i tell you one thing i admire about the white folks, they know who they are. look at the italians. they didn't care about the American flag and all that when they got here. first thing they did is to put together the mafia to make sure their intrests were met. the irish they took the city hall and found their boys jobs. the Jews the same thing.. you telling me they care more about some black kid in the south side than they do about they relatives in isarel? shit!> its about blood, Barack, looking after your own. period. black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.”
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Barack Obama
“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”
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Barack Obama
“In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?”
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Barack Obama
“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”
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Barack Obama
“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
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Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
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Barack Obama
“I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
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Barack Obama
“I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.”
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Barack Obama
“In a...media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter...Information [can] become a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”
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Barack Obama
“We must lift ourselves up, dust ourselfs off and begin the work of remaking America.”
―
Barack Obama
