Quotes from Barack Obama

Negara yang tidak bisa mengendalikan sumber energinya, tidak bisa mengendalikan masa depannya.

THERE IS NOT a Black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America. There's the United States of America.

I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.

Then again, a president wasn't a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions - that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth - that was the bar I needed to clear.

trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people

I noticed that my mother paid for her intellectual freedom with chronic financial struggles and occasional personal chaos

You think you may not be ready, that you'll do it at a more convenient time. But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you're willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.

And I say to you today that we need more folks in this country who are a good crazy….You can't tell what will happen when you get folks with some good crazy…going to the polls to vote!

I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him, it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and in that insisting on getting my own way all the time without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself. ...In one form or another, it is what we all must go through in order to grow up.

When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.

No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually unrewarded.

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.

right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin.

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.

Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory.

We now live in a world where the most valuable skill you can sell is knowledge.

America will rise again. And hope will rise again.

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

That feels like what happened. A collective, unspoken decision was made that for a few weeks at least, the country would take a much-needed break from cynicism.

Listen to understand rather than listen to respond.

The audacity of hope! I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, 'There's a bright side somewhere Ã¢â'¬Â¦ don't rest till you find it Ã¢â'¬Â¦.'" "That's right!" "The audacity of hope!

They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.