2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history; that we are masters of our fate. But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. We’ll have to reignite the embers of empathy and fellow feeling, the coalition of conscience that found expression in this place 50 years ago. And I believe that spirit is there, that truth force inside each of us. I see it when a white mother recognizes her own daughter in the face of a poor black child. I see it when the black youth thinks of his own grandfather in the dignified steps of an elderly white man. It’s there when the native-born recognizing that striving spirit of the new immigrant; when the interracial couple connects the pain of a gay couple who are discriminated against and understands it as their own. That’s where courage comes from -- when we turn not from each other, or on each other, but towards one another, and we find that we do not walk alone. That’s where courage comes from.
2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Nomination Acceptance Speech (29 August 2008) http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gG5l5C
2008
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 159.
Quoted in: Bryan C. Paraiso (2012) " Bonifacio reveals fervor in writings http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/315489/bonifacio-reveals-fervor-in-writings." Philippine Daily Inquirer. November 30, 2012.
Original: Bisogna far tesoro dei nostri errori affinché non si ripetano e ci insegnino ad affrontare la vita nel migliore dei modi.
Source: prevale.net
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 556.
“Our lives teach us who we are.”
I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
