Barack Obama Quotes

The event of the landing of these brethren upon our shores is to be, not without its beneficial effect, as well to the colored population of this country, as it promises to be to ill-fated Africa.

[God] largely augmented our free population by emancipation and immigration.

… the settlement and moral improvement of the colored population of Canada, for the purpose of purchasing crown or clergy reserve lands in the township of Raleigh and settling the same with colored families resident in Canada of approved moral character

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

In Romania, of course, gymnastics is among the most popular sports, and my parents had a dream of escaping the Ceausescu regime and giving their child a better life. So they came to the United States and put me in gymnastics.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor, holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love.

My great-grandfather, like many, came to this country in search of the American dream.

This sweet, blessed, God-inspired place called America is a champion that has absorbed some blows. But while we bend, we don't break. This is no dark hour; this is the dawn before we remember who we are.

Now we understand much more clearly. why people from all over the world want to come to New York and to America. It's called freedom.

We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Those who do not want to participate in the spirit of America should not settle in America.

Walls have never stopped people from trying to better their lives.

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope on earth.

In my boyhood a majority of the people of East Tennessee [where he was born] were abolitionists …. It was safer to make an anti-slavery speech in the South than it became during the thirties [1830’s] to make the same speech in the North.

We are a nation of immigrants. It is immigrants who brought to this land the skills of their hands and brains to make it a beacon of opportunity and of hope for all men.

If any gentleman from the South shall propose a scheme to be carried on by this government upon a large scale, for the transportation of the colored people to any colony or any place in the world, I should be quite disposed to incur almost any degree of expense to accomplish that object.

I deem it best and, therefore, recommend a resolution memorializing the Congress of the United States to purchase territory, either domestic or foreign, and provide means to purchase the property of the negroes at reasonable prices, and to transport the negroes to the territory purchased by the United States. The United States to organize a government for them of the Negro race; to protect them from foreign invasion, to prevent white people from living among them in the territory; and to prevent negroes from migrating back to the United States.

The Asylum they open to the oppressed of all nations should console the earth. The case with which the injured may escape from oppressive governments, will compel Princes to become just and cautious; and the rest of the world will gradually open their eyes upon the empty illusions with which they have been hitherto cheated by politicians. But for this purpose America must preserve herself from these illusions; and take care to avoid being what your ministerial writers are frequently saying She will be — an image of our Europe — a mass of divided powers contending for territory and commerce, and continually cementing the slavery of the people with their own blood.

Our country is a country where immigration is history and it is a country where immigration is destiny.