“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
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Barack Obama
“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”b”
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Barack Obama
“Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power
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Barack Obama
“I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I told Francis. “You are probably right,” he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
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Barack Obama
“You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”
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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
“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”
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Barack Obama
“the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
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Barack Obama
“There are a whole lot of religious people in America, including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious discourse—when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.”
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Barack Obama
“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed." --on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people”
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Barack Obama
“Indeed, it's not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.”
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Barack Obama
“I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task.”
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Barack Obama
“The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.”
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Barack Obama
“When I see Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously. I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.”
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Barack Obama
