Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

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.

Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.

It's amazing to me that, in the 42 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, women today still receive fewer wages than men for the same work.

If nobody throws all their rules at you, you might make a song with no introduction.

It is not all darkness in a heart which can cry, "My God".

When I was much younger, I sometimes felt rejected by feminists because of an image that I sold because it paid the bills. Any fool could tell my hair is dyed.

Our challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.

Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars.

I like making money like anybody else, and I'm paid well, but I think there is a point at which you can out-price your audience or your base.

I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people, and take away their freedom of choice and religion.