Grace Quotes

“Slow progress could wear you down almost as much as no progress at all. I just disagreed with it. If someone was convinced that cutting the uninsured rate in half was a failure because we couldn’t cut it to zero immediately, I couldn’t help them. Progress, however unfinished, was still better than huffing the self-satisfied fumes of purity.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word We. We the People. We Shall Overcome. Yes We Can. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh,”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken; there is new ground to cover; there are more bridges to be crossed.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“After a mass shooting, Republicans and the gun manufacturers' lobby reliably rally around the Second Amendment, shielding it better than they shield our own kids. They immediately gaslight the country, churning up bullshit like an octopus trying to blind a predator with sand.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“they gave Obama what they’d bought—a Father’s Day card they’d all signed for him. One of the boys looked at Obama and told him, “I never signed a Father’s Day card before.” Obama, always aware of what his words meant, closed the card and looked back at the boy. “I’ve never signed a Father’s Day card either.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“students to the White House for lunch and a second conversation.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Even the smallest of men can do outsized damage to the idea of America.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government . . .”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs, and arson, and shots fired at churches—not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion; an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“By our seventh year in the White House, my team and I had worked hundreds if not thousands of happy endings into speeches, endings powered by some wonderful daily story that came to us from out there in any one of the “real Americas.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“The president’s decision to travel to Charleston will place him in the role of national eulogist at the center of a national tragedy, much as he has done in other occasions such as after the massacre at a school in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012. This time it comes freighted with the questions of race and hatred in a country that has elected an African American as president but still struggles with the legacy of division.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Not really. I mean, this isn’t ‘just’ a mass shooting; it’s a mass shooting by a fucking white supremacist. I don’t even know if it’s possible for the first Black president to calm rather than inflame tensions. And even if it is, I don’t think I can write something that gets him there.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“I don’t envy you. Guns, race, the flag, and you have to pay respect to the nine people who died too—this isn’t an easy task. I really was struck by those families, though. They offered”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” We the People. We Shall Overcome. Yes We Can. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction. That’s why, for such a young nation, we are so big and bold and diverse and full of contradictions, because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship—that willingness of a twenty-six-year-old deacon, a Unitarian minister, or a young”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“We don’t think government can solve all our problems. But we don’t think that government is the source of all our problems—any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles. Because we understand that this democracy is ours.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Go ask a Black man who lived through the fifties or sixties if nothing’s changed, he’d say. He’ll set you straight. It’s indisputable that things have gotten better. That doesn’t mean institutional racism doesn’t exist; it does. To remind us how far we’ve come doesn’t ignore how far we have to go.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again—not by reasserting the past but by transcending the past.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Who gets to decide what it means to be an American? Who gets to be the arbiter of which Americans are worthy and which aren’t, who belongs and who doesn’t, whose views are valid and whose aren’t?”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Selma is about each of us asking ourselves what we can do to make America better. That’s the American story. Not just scratching for what was or settling for what is—but imagining what might be. Insisting we live up to our highest ideals. So let’s translate Selma for this generation. Let’s give today’s young people their marching orders.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

“Lewis knew the game and had schooled his unarmed, neatly dressed flock in the tactics of nonviolence before leading them out of Brown Chapel AME Church for the fifty-mile march. They didn’t make it one mile before state police met them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, choking them with tear gas, breaking their bones with batons, and cracking Lewis’s skull so badly he feared he might die.”
― Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America