I also grew up with community co-parents who looked out for each other. They looked out for children and tried to be the hands of God. They tried to live their faith.

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

It's time for greatness - not for greed. It's a time for idealism - not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.

The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.

Abnormal – nonsense. Suggests a norm, which is a tag placed on those who don’t conform to an elite’s view of itself.

Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.

Long friendships are like jewels, polished over time to become beautiful and enduring.

Don't use Buddhism to become a Buddhist. Use Buddhism to become better at whatever else in your life you are doing already.

We went to - I guess it was a legitimate boiler room, and I sat in front of this guy who literally was on the phone with two people at once. They call it double fisting.

Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.

As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.