Some choice quotes from "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama:
Concerning interpreting the constitution:
(The Constitution) won’t tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.
What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future.
Taxing the most wealthy percent of the country:
At a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford pay a bit more in taxes.
More than anything, it is the sense – that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together – that we can’t afford to lose. As the change of pace accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain.
The separation of church and state:
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason.
Race in America:
After all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be wearying business. It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round – the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error.
On government-funded programs:
Americans are willing to compete with the world. We work harder than the people of any other wealthy nation. We are willing to tolerate more economic instability and are willing to take more personal risks to get ahead. But we can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance – and if we know that our families have some net beneath which they cannot fall.
America's dependency on oil:
A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future.
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