America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

In my ArtI have butone fear:that we willfail to befearless.

Time to get a go on this drop-dead-gorgeous morning.

And, in the end, I knew there was nothing better in life than keeping the head and the heart up—and when you cannot see the shoreline, always putting one hand, one word, in front of the other.

Leadership is often the afterthought of educational change.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

I don't think of myself as an evil monster and I hope I'm not.

Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.

A child who dies from hunger is a murdered child.

It’s time we framed every question - every issue -- not in terms of what’s in it for ‘me,’ but what’s in it for all of us?

There are few things in life that bring as much joy as the joy that comes from assisting another improve his or her life.