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.
How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.
New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars
Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.
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