I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.
I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.
In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.
I like being president because i get a cool house.
As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy. Or.
We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.
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.
More than anything, it is that sense – that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together – that we can’t afford to lose.
The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those – like the White House press office – who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.
So secure was his power that rumblings of discontent had finally surfaced within his own base, among black nationalists upset with his willingness to cut whites and Hispanics into the action, among activists disappointed with his failure to tackle poverty head-on, and among people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.
What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim.
Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.
Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before they’ve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could. Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption.
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.
In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.
But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.
The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.
Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.
Ketika kita terus menggunakan miliaran dolar untuk berbagai sistem senjata yang nilainya meragukan namun tidak mau menggunakan uang itu untuk melindungi pabrik-pabrik kimia yang sangat rapuh di pusat-pusat urban yang utama, menjadi semakin sulit bagi kita untuk meminta negara-negara lain menjaga pabrik-pabrik tenaga nuklir mereka.
I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn’t make my heart heavy.