For too long, we've been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we're doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias.
Barack ObamaRelated topics
ask bias blind career catch cause children continue criminal examine hate job justice men languish lost now past perhaps permit poverty present see shape sure system tough tragedy way young hearts tens questionsRelated quotes
Barack believes in the greatness of America. He's seen it in his own life's journey. But he also knows that what's holding us back is that our leaders have lost touch with the ideals that make this country great. Ideals like equality. Justice. Freedom from want and despair. And he believes that until we restore a sense of common destiny and shared purpose; until we understand that we are only as strong as the weakest among us; that there is more that binds us together than drives us apart; until we see ourselves in one another – until we truly care for all children; not just our own then we will continue to struggle with the problems that plague us.
Michelle Obama
The priest said to the man who married: "Remember that you are caught for life. This door opens but once. Before this den of matrimony the tracks are all one way.” This was in the nature of a punishment for having married. The theologian felt that the contract of marriage, if not contrary to God's command, was at least contrary to his advice, and that the married ought to suffer in some way, as a matter of justice. The fact that there could be no divorce, that a mistake could not be corrected, was held up as a warning. At every wedding feast this skeleton stretched its fleshless finger towards bride and groom.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe. If we ignore this, there will be no peace. There has been a widening of horizons to which in the West we have been perhaps too insensitive. Yet it is as important as the extension of our vision into outer space.
Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.
Lester B. Pearson
Give us another 3 or 4 months of production, not more hampered than it is at present, and we shall have something over, with which we can make ourselves disagreeable in many ways, and many places. We could perhaps take a stronger line with Japan then, even though we still got no help from the U. S. A. ...People ask me how we are going to win this war. I suppose it is a very natural question, but I don't think the time has come to answer it. We must just go on fighting as hard as we can, in the belief that some time-perhaps sooner than we think-the other side will crack.
Neville Chamberlain
People who say: 'Ah, this Beuys will go back to the middle ages, or to the stone dwellers, cliff dwellers.' No, there is a misunderstanding. I have nothing against the materialistic methodology of analytics, but I think we have to enlarge this thing, not to get caught in a very restricted one-sidedness in our way of looking towards life. Because the problems of life, soul, humankind's spirit, the problems of intuition, imagination, and inspiration, the problems of birth and death, the problems of survival in a bigger shape, and to bring in the image of the meaning of man.
Joseph Beuys
