Barack Obama Quotes

I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.

A girl born in Drumchapel in Glasgow has just as much right to good health and the opportunities provided by a good education as a Surrey stockbroker's son.

Habitat has opened up unprecedented opportunities for me to cross the chasm that separates those of us who are free, safe, financially secure, well fed and housed, and influential enough to shape our own destiny from our neighbors who enjoy few, if any, of these advantages of life.

If the spirit of equality means anything, it means like opportunity, and if we once lose like opportunity, we lose the only chance we have toward equality throughout the nation.

Civil rights are meaningless without economic rights.

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

I know what it's like to access the privilege of a ZIP Code but also be born in one that could have destined me to something else.

We can and will make Chicago a place where your ZIP code doesn't determine your destiny.

There are people in America who are absolutely desperate right now, who have no means to support their families, who have no opportunities to better themselves or their education - and they're not that different from the farmers and working-class people that I visited when I went to Kenya with Oxfam.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.

My grandmother instilled in me two important lessons: I was just as good as anyone else, and education was my salvation. Fortunately, I was able to get scholarships to excellent schools, but I was one of the lucky ones. All of this is what draws me to anti-poverty organizations like Oxfam.

Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.

The camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination, against poverty, against racism.

I can't look in the mirror and see people dying on the street that should have the same opportunities that I've had. And say 'You know what? I can live with myself.' Because I can't if I just watch.

The first thing that you need to deal with is the issue of equity and poverty.

The law ... allows rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges.

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute; that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that's not fair. You were born in America; that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.

A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

I choose the poverty of our poor people. But I am grateful to receive it (the Nobel) in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.

Only by becoming poor ourselves, by stripping away our complacency, will we be able to identify with the least of our brothers and sisters.

I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all.