“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.”

ilainya meragukan namun tidak mau menggunakan uang itu untuk melindungi pabrik-pabrik kimia yang sangat rapuh di pusat-pusat urban yang utama, menjadi semakin sulit bagi kita untuk meminta negara-negara lain menjaga pabrik-pabrik tenaga nuklir mereka.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”

“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

“First of all, I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a fieldinitiated program begun under the previous administration." Truth: The program was started in October 2009 and the strategy was decided at the Department of Justice in Washington

“To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

“America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.” 

“the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”

“Change is never easy, but always possible.”

“A woman named Helen Keller fought her way through long, silent darkness. Though she could not see or hear, she taught us to look at and listen to each other. Never waiting for life to get easier, she gave others courage to face their challenges.”

“White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.”

“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”

“America will rise again. And hope will rise again.”