We will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do. I

If people can learn to hate they can learn to love.

Thanks for sticking with this," Axe said, his voice choked up. I put my arm around him, feeling my own emotions swell. "This is why we do the work," I said. "This. Right here.

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

We will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.

Despite all that, they'd given me a chance. Through the noise and chatter of the political circus, they'd heard my call for something different. Even if I hadn't always been at my best, they'd divined what was best in me: the voice insisting that for all our differences, we remained bound as one people, and that, together, men and women of goodwill could find a way to a better future.

I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Good people don't give up on the ones they love.

What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past