Dreams from My Father Quotes

“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.” We”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Semakin aku mengenal sistem, semakin aku yakin bahwa reformasi pendidikan adalah satu-satunya solusi bagi remaja bermasalah di luar sana. Tanpa keluarga yang stabil, tanpa prospek mendapatkan pekerjaan bergengsi yang akan membantu keuangan keluarga, pendidikan adalah harapan terbesar mereka.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“المجتمعات لابد من أن تُنشأ، ويُحارب من أجلها، وأن يُعتنى بها كما يعتني المرء ببستانه، فهي تتوسع أو تنكمش طبقًا لأحلام رجالها.”
― باراك أوباما, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“عرفت أن العالم عنيف، ولا يمكن توقع ما سيحدث فيه، وغالبًا ما يكون قاسيًا.”
― باراك أوباما, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Aku tersandung pada salah satu rahasia yang tersimpan dengan baik tentang orang-orang kulit hitam: kebanyakan orang kulit hitam tidak tertarik dengan revolusi; kebanyakan kami merasa lelah dengan masalah ras.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Bagaimana bisa Amerika mengirimkan orangnya ke ruang angkasa, namun masih membuat batasan bagi penduduknya yang berkulit hitam?”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Yeah, not bad. You’re starting to listen. But it’s still too abstract … like you’re taking a survey or something. If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people’s centers. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you’ll never form the relationships you need to get them involved.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The audacity of hope! I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, ‘There’s a bright side somewhere … don’t rest till you find it ….’” “That’s right!” “The audacity of hope!”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone--and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come. The”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In class and seminars I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I'd discovered in books., thinking - falsely - that the slogans meant something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I'd never known.
...
Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing its own falsehoods) that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men... Through organising, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned... I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my life.
That was my idea of organising. It was a promise of redemption.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues,”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone else who had ridden in an airplane before. So they expected everything from him. ‘Ah, Barack, you are a big shot now. You should give me something. You should help me.’ Always these pressures from family. And he couldn’t say no, he was so generous. You”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance