“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

2007

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: p>Everyone who realizes what those glorious patriots knew on that day -- that change does not come from Washington, but to Washington; that change has always been built on our willingness, We The People, to take on the mantle of citizenship -- you are marching.And that’s the lesson of our past. That's the promise of tomorrow -- that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. That when millions of Americans of every race and every region, every faith and every station, can join together in a spirit of brotherhood, then those mountains will be made low, and those rough places will be made plain, and those crooked places, they straighten out towards grace, and we will vindicate the faith of those who sacrificed so much and live up to the true meaning of our creed, as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.</p

"As Much Truth As One Can Bear" in The New York Times Book Review (14 January 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan<!-- , also quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 114 -->
Context: Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. … Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Also appears in Jodi Picoult book Small Great Things
Source: In 1962 James Baldwin penned an essay titled “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” in “The New York Times Book Review”.
Context: We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. ... Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Announcement of Candidacy for President of the United States. (10 February 2007) http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/10/obama.president/index.html <br class="br">2007

Tweet Jan 31, 2012, 6:29AM https://twitter.com/basselsafadi/status/164354595982819329 at Twitter.com

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

Remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit at Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on April 10, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/10/remarks-president-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit <br class="br">2014

Source: &quot;National Digital Transformation: A Conversation With Serbia’s Prime Minister Ana Brnabic&quot; in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwolcott/2021/06/15/national-digital-transformation-a-conversation-with-serbias-prime-minister-ana-brnabic/?sh=429139813889 (15 June 2021)