I do think the president's best role is usually as the sort of initiator.

Race to race, the Republicans are putting up candidates that are quite far out of the mainstream in terms of should we have passed the Civil Rights Act or does Social Security need to exist.

If faith is your motivation, share that.

Most evil in the world is only partly because of an evil person. Most of it is because of the complicity of bystanders.

I think life is sacred, whether it's abortion or the death penalty.

No couples in Virginia can adopt other than a married couple - that's the right policy.

We spend at least $5 for remedial education right now for every dollar we put in early childhood education. All the studies on early childhood education show this is going to pay for itself.

Matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They're moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves.

I'm not going to give a courtesy gift to a person who's going to win, and I'm not going to give a sympathy gift to a person who's going to lose.

If you want to have a society where people are respected and respect laws, you can't have somebody at the top who demeans every group that he talks about.

I think if you run away from who you are, that you're a Democrat and you're proud to be a Democrat, it's foolish. And the reason it's foolish is you've got a lot to be proud of.

But now we have time. Endless time stretches before us.

Ships have feelings.

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday.

We usually say there is always a ‘Plan B,’ but there is no ‘Planet B’.

One person caring about another represents life's greatest value.

The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.

Everything bad has... you know, has a good.

I'm not impressed by people's degrees. Harvard doesn't impress me, Yale doesn't impress me, Columbia doesn't impress me.