Barack Obama Quotes

Conservatives are better talking about opportunity and growth in the abstract, while liberals talk more about poor people. Right now we [americans] need a good, optimistic, conservative opportunity ideology that is totally geared toward lifting up the poor. That's what I most want to see in candidates.

I'm going to fight as hard as I can to make sure people have the futures that they deserve here in America.

We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least the barriers to such success and thriving are completely removed. I think the black narcissism that prevails, along with the stylish materialism and self-satisfied, smug attitudes among many of our upwardly mobile brothers and sisters should be identified and criticized.

When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it's only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.

I think that part of my optimism comes from the belief that we as a people could actually, regardless of all the disadvantage of the past, regardless of the fact that a lot of other folks got a head start in the race, if we were able to make the race fair right now.

The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there's upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.

All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

I see an America where poverty is defeated by opportunity, not enabled by a government check.

The erosion of equal opportunity is among the greatest threats to our exceptionalism as a nation. But it also provides us with an exciting and historic opportunity: to help more people than ever achieve the American Dream.

From the time I entered cabinet, the emphasis was on reforms, but reforms which did not abolish separate development, but reforms which were aimed at changing the very, very dehumanising aspects. Giving greater freedom of movement, giving private property ownership within so-called white South Africa also to blacks. Abolishing the concept of job reservation on the basis of race and colour. Allowing free organisation for trade unions, also black trade unions.

We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return.

It would, I think, be hard for anyone to make the case that the United States is a just society or anything close to a just society. In America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.

Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

And what would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth.

I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

We were trying to transform America, not triumph over white folk.

The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

The goal - is the dignity of the black man in America. He wants respect as the human being. He wants recognition as a human being.

We want everybody to think about what's in their interests. And I believe that our Democratic party platform has a better vision and better actually pathway for white Americans, as well black Americans, Latino Americans, women, and so forth, to be successful.

Poverty isn’t solved with donations.