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“Change won't come from the top, Change will come from mobilized grassroots.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Di Indonesia, kekuasaan diperlihatkan secara terang-terangan, tidak pandang bulu, terbuka, selalu segar dalam ingatan.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren’t interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn't there before.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

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

“How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes? This”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people’s psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed. “I’m not a poet, Barack. I’m an organizer.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

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

“As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy. Or”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.â€� Patronage,”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to work for themselves.â€� And you know what he would say to me? He would say, ‘How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

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

“And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance