President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of collective responsibility and shared values in achieving a modern American Dream.
William J. Clinton highlights President Obama’s vision for America, advocating for a 21st-century understanding of the American Dream that focuses on inclusivity, mutual support, and collaboration. Instead of individual success alone, this vision calls for a collective effort to ensure that opportunities and prosperity are accessible to all citizens, promoting a society where responsibilities are shared for the greater good.
In practice
This quote can be used during a community meeting to inspire collaboration.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.
The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
There does, in fact, appear to be a plan.
The true objective of war is peace.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.