"Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. ... Hope is the bedrock of this nation -- the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us. By all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is -- who have the courage to remake the world as it should be. Together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things." -- Barack Obama