“Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.”
―
Barack Obama
“We may come from different places and have different stories, but we share common hopes, and one very American dream.”
―
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 constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But”
―
Barack Obama
“Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess.”
―
Barack Obama
“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
―
Barack Obama
“White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.”
―
Barack Obama
“No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.”
―
Barack Obama
“Orang takkan pernah terlalu sibuk untuk memahami asalnya. --Nenek”
―
Barack Obama
“The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life.”
―
Barack Obama
“We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.”
―
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
“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”
―
Barack Obama
“We're up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.”
―
Barack Obama
“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”
―
Barack Obama
