That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke. 284
I started playing ball when I was a kid. My dad was a pro ball player and he passed on his knowledge to me. 364
And let me tell you, you boys of America, that there is no higher inspiration to any man to be a good man, a good citizen, and a good son, brother, or father, than the knowledge that you come from honest blood. 412
My dad is like a cactus – introverted and tough. I’m a people person, like my mom, but I got my competitiveness from my dad. He came to this country from Belarus with nothing and built a real business. He’s my hero for giving me that need to run a business and for having enormous confidence in me. 306
Later, at Stanford University, I thought I’d become a lawyer or businessman, but my father came to me and said he thought there was a big future in the fine-wine business. 935
I feel lazy when I’m not working. I learned all my business sense from my dad. He always believed in me, and I think the last thing he said to me before he passed away was, ‘I know you’re gonna be OK. I’m not worried about you’. 309
I think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with. 980
Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity – the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, ‘Field of Dreams’, the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it’s a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches. 317
I don’t write from dreams because I don’t remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages. 302
IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere. 817
The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ is Jimmy Carter’s short campaign autobiography, ‘Why Not the Best?,’ published in 1975. 331
‘Dreams From My Father’ reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they’re dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. 341
My father, his spirit is with me constantly, and I’m a believer in that world and the world of dreams and that stuff. 261
Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist. 276
I see happiness as a by-product. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. 319
