Barack Obama Quotes
Commencement speech at Howard University, as quoted in 'Obama: Students Need to Stop Shutting Down Speech of People They Disagree With' by Josh Feldman, Mediaite (7 May 2016)
Quotes to Explore
-
I just enjoy life now. I just enjoy every morning I get to wake up.
-
To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.
-
There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled.
-
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
-
Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change.
-
It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.
-
What you want to do, particularly when you're dealing with a professional sports league and franchises and people's passionate commitment to the game and for the team they root for is, it has to be sustainable.
-
There's nothing called a perfect pick-up line. Men always have to face the risk of rejection.
-
That's actually how my parents met. They were pen pals. My mom was in the Philippines and my father was in the States, and they wrote to each other. He went out to meet her, and they wed not too long after.
-
Everything that has happened to me has been amazing and surprising.
-
The bad guys don't always get punished and the good guys are not necessarily pure.
-
Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.
-
Circle are praised, not that abound, In largeness, but the exactly round.
-
You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.
-
The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're out-voted.
-
Women have a lot of... attitudes enforced in us about our sense of attractiveness being bound up in long, flowing, Hollywood kind of hair.
-
There are as many forms of happiness as sorrow, though most prove fleeting.
-
A lot of black guys always ask me, 'Did Larry Bird really play that good?' I said, 'Larry Bird is so good it's frightening.'
-
A song of mine called 'I'll Take Care of You' was on that 'Wide Open Spaces' Dixie Chicks album.
-
Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.
-
Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.
-
Many books have mattered enormously to my life and work. 'David Copperfield' by Charles Dickens would be one of several contenders for 'most influential.' I first read it at 13 and have reread it dozens of times since.
-
Sports plays an interesting role in society. The greatest sportsmen have platforms to speak out on issues and really affect how the public thinks about some very critical issues facing the world.
-
Commencement speech at Howard University, as quoted in 'Obama: Students Need to Stop Shutting Down Speech of People They Disagree With' by Josh Feldman, Mediaite (7 May 2016)
