“We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”
―
Barack Obama
“it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
―
Barack Obama
“There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
―
Barack Obama
“What's happened here, Sayid? There never used to be such begging."
"You are right," he said. "I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, 'You are poor.' So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn't have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”
―
Barack Obama
“There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.”
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Barack Obama
“When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.”
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Barack Obama
“well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government”
―
Barack Obama
“in the state capital. But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention,”
―
Barack Obama
“You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.”
―
Barack Obama
“In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.”
―
Barack Obama
“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”
―
Barack Obama
“This is the moment we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”
―
Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy." President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books”
―
Barack Obama
“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.”
―
Barack Obama
