Dreams From My Father Quotes

Pot had helped, and booze, maybe a little blow when you could afford it.

This book [Dreams from My Father] was more of a reflection on my public life, now as a U.S. senator and before that as a state senator; how my perspectives around the issues of the day are shaped by my background.

It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ is Jimmy Carter’s short campaign autobiography, ‘Why Not the Best?,’ published in 1975.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

‘Dreams From My Father’ reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they’re dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

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. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on ‘Dreams From My Father,’ was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.

Its [Dreams from My Father] also a reflection about how we might start a better conversation in our democracy about how to solve problems, because it feels as if our political system – it just seems there is so much cynicism and negativity in our politics.

My father, his spirit is with me constantly, and I’m a believer in that world and the world of dreams. So I’ve had dreams of my father over the years, and that’s the way I really stay connected to him. He’s still in my subconscious. He lives in there.

All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass – what values we must live by.