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Obama Quotes

Browse 122 quotes about Obama.

Obama Quotes

“When blue-collar, white workers in middle America look at Donald Trump in his fill-fitting suit and baseball cap, with a physical image that is perhaps more like their own, they see a possibility that they could be him. Aside from his skin colour, Barack Obama, with his lean physique, good looks and charisma, hanging out with rock stars and movie stars, his life and what he stands for seems at a far remove. Except the reality is that he was raised without his father, cared for by his grandparents and moved around a lot as a child, meaning he has potentially much more in common with the Appalachian voters than Donald Trump. He lived and achieved the American Dream in arguably a more fundamental way than Trump did.”

TrumpAmerican DreamObamaPopulismSocial Mobility
Book:In America: Tales from Trump Country
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“Is Obama Anything but Black? So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black. Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.”

BlackRaceBiracialMultiracialObamaMixed Race
Book:Americanah
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“I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama’s government will be remembered as the peak of deregulated corporate corruption and not the ongoing rise of it.”

GovernmentHopePresidentCorruptionBarackCorporateRememberedHopefulPresident ObamaHope QuotesSincerelyOngoingCorruptGovernment QuotesRiseCorporate CultureGovernment CorruptionObamaGovernment ProgramsGovernment SpendingGovernmentsGovernment AbuseCorruption QuotesCorruption PoliticsGovernment RegulationPresidentsCorporate AmericaCorporate WorldCorporate GreedBarack ObamaPeakGovernment Cover UpsGovernment PropagandaCorporate QuotesCorrupt LeadersCorruptedCorporate LifeCorrupt PoliticsCorporate EthicsPresident Of The United StatesCorporate InfluencePresidential PoliticsDeregulatedCorporate Profit
Author:Steven Magee
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“The best guide I know of is political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” mentioned above, the thesis that to a good first approximation, we can understand elections to be occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to control the state, a very good predictor of policy over a long period, as he shows. For 2008, we would therefore anticipate that the interests of the financial industries, the major funders (who preferred Obama to McCain), would be “most peculiarly attended to” by government policy, in accord with Adam Smith’s maxim. And so we find.”

DemocracyEconomicsObamaAdam SmithDemocratic ElectionsPredatory CapitalismThomas Ferguson
Book:Hopes and Prospects
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“Historically, whenever Black people and people of color made progress in America, the demons of white rage would rise with a fury to choke and wrestle this country back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was inevitable that Obama's election would unleash and invigorate the same malevolent forces that had always existed and corrupted America's promise for the rest of us. I knew it. Many people of color knew it and lived it. Even Obama knew it.”

AmericaRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksObamaBacklashBarack ObamaPeople Of Color
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.”

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Book:The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House
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“The Democratic party in Louisiana just continued to move father and farther away from basic American values and farther away from the voters of Louisiana. And much farther away from me. So I just couldn’t take it anymore. And recently, there was some comments made in the Senate, the comments were that if anyone opposes what we frequently call Obamacare, if anyone opposes it, they do so only because the President is an African-American, and therefore, that position is racist. My mother, who’s 103 years old, called me on the telephone when she heard that. She said ‘Boy, I don’t want you to be involved in anything like that. I hope you disassociated yourself from that’ and I was on the verge of doing it anyway, and that was just the last straw,”

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Author:Elbert Guillory
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“McChrystal never should have been hired for this job given the outrageous cover-up he participated in after the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. He was lucky to keep the job after his 'Seven Days in May' stunt in London last year when he openly lobbied and undercut the president on the surge. But with the latest sassing, and the continued Sisyphean nature of the surge he urged, McChrystal should offer his resignation. He should try subordination for a change.”

LondonObamaSpeechesInsubordinationCoverupsFriendly FireWar In Afghanistan 2001Stanley McchrystalPat TillmanSassing
Author:Maureen Dowd
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“We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States,’ Obama said in 2005. ‘But those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law, and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.’ He added: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.’ A few years later, in a 2013 State of the Union address, Obama promised to put illegal immigrants ‘to the back of the line.’ He even once told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: ‘Our direct message to families is ‘do not send your children to the border.’ If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. But they may not make it [at all].’ Yes, that’s progressive hero, Mr. Hope and Change himself, Barack Obama, sounding an awful lot like evil, racist Republican Donald Trump, wouldn’t you say?”

TrumpIllegal ImmigrantsObama
Book:Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
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“[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce. That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.”

GovernmentPoliticsRichGeniusCapitalismIntelligentDemocraticCorruptionTerrorismBrilliantSocialismReformCommunismCorporationsProgressiveFascismDictatorTransparencyGoreFree TradeObamaInefficiencyProtectionismWashingtonLincolnGreen PartyBushJeffersonCorporatocracyCoup D EtatRalph NaderAnti Free TradeNader
Author:Ralph Nader
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“For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Mr. Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him the richest head of state in world history. For all the rumors and speculation, though, there has been little if any hard evidence, and Gunvor has adamantly denied any financial ties to Mr. Putin and repeated that denial on Friday. But Mr. Obama’s response to the Ukraine crisis, while derided by critics as slow and weak, has reinvigorated a 15-year global hunt for Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to announce another round of sanctions as early as Monday targeting Russians it considers part of Mr. Putin’s financial circle, it is sending a not-very-subtle message that it thinks it knows where the Russian leader has his money, and that he could ultimately be targeted directly or indirectly. “It’s something that could be done that would send a very clear signal of taking the gloves off and not just dance around it,” said Juan C. Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who helped pioneer the government’s modern financial campaign techniques to choke off terrorist money.”

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Author:Peter Baker
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“On Undecided Voter​s: "To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?” To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”

PoliticsVoteVotersObamaUndecided
Author:David Sedaris
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“President Obama, inciter-in-chief, regularly used violent rhetoric to gin up the Democrats: ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.’ He supported the most violent, seditious movements of 21st-century America (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Muslim Brotherhood groups, to name a few), while directing the Department of Homeland Security to track ‘right-wing extremists’—in other words, Americans like you and me.”

Black Lives MatterObamaOccupy Wall StreetMuslim Brotherhood
Book:FATWA: Hunted in America
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“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”

EconomicsObamaProgressivismKeynesFdr
Book:Economics in One Lesson
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“In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't. I found myself wondering whether we'd somehow turned a virtue into a vice; whether, trapped in my own high-mindedness, I'd failed to tell the American people a story they could believe in; and whether having ceded the political narrative to my critics, I was going to be able to wrest it back.”

AmericaPoliticsPresidentEconomyObamaRecession
Book:A Promised Land
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