First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Walls turned sideways are bridges.

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

We must always attempt to lift as we climb

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

The essence of a university is free and open inquiry, and when it loses that it is no longer a university.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.

It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the American eagle catch sight of it, than he swooned and fell off his perch.

I would not change very much about the American theater. I marvel and rejoice in the way the country's regional theaters have formed a network that has become, in essence, our National Theater.

I personally believe that [Donald Trump] is wrong on the condition of America.

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.

Certain names always awake certain prejudices.

Benevolence, like religion, awes even those it cannot win.