Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.

What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love...They're the guiding lights of a life.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

America has no functioning democracy at this moment.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

It is difficult for the common good to prevail against the intense concentration of those who have a special interest, especially if the decisions are made behind locked doors.

Those who are great know a secret that the remaining lot do not know.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

The real trick is to stay alive as long as you live.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

One's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.

It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

The gambling interests like to point to the construction jobs, but those jobs go away

Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness.

I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern... I'm pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular.

I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.