Quotes from Barack Obama

What an amazing gift to help people, not just yourself.

nasionalisme terurai dalam sikap belaka dan bukan program konkret, setumpuk keluhan dan bukan kekuatan yang terorganisasi, gambar dan bunyi yang memadati gelombang udara dan percakapan, namun tanpa perwujudan jasadi.

I've now been in 57 states -- I think one left to go. --at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon

As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.

This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.

I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people — and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of: 'The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that's enough.'" He added: "If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far. That's easy to do.

But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do. I

People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.

I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell—that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures collided, leaving me tongue-tied.

Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school.

But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person. I

Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.

Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama!" Keyes would proclaim, deliberately mispronouncing my name every time. I beat him by more than forty points—the biggest margin for a Senate race in the state's history.

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless;

Unlike most academics, Warren showed a gift for translating financial analysis into stories that ordinary folks could understand. In the intervening years, she had emerged as one of the financial industry's most effective critics, prompting Harry Reid to appoint her as chair of the congressional panel overseeing TARP.

just as MBZ had predicted, in the small island nation of Bahrain, huge, mostly Shiite demonstrations against the government of King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa were taking place in the capital city of Manama, and the Bahraini government responded with force, killing scores of protesters and injuring hundreds more.

We were expecting maybe a hundred people at the park," Jeremiah said, "but right now they're counting at least five hundred. They asked us to slow down so they have time to deal with the overflow.

If people can learn to hate they can learn to love.

If we want other countries to support our priorities," I told my NSC team, "we can't just bully them into it. We've got to show them we're taking their perspectives into account—or at least can find them on a map.

subjecting yourself to criticism, and the alternative—playing it safe, avoiding controversy, following the polls—was not only a recipe for mediocrity but a betrayal of the hopes of those citizens who'd put you in office.

slowly undermining the institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging in the same corruption, cronyism, and exploitation as existed in the past." He confirmed that the economic