I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'

False hope is worse than despair.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

To know Jesus Christ, you must first understand his supernatural identity. He is God.

He looked like someone pretending to be a knight, which was bad. He figured pretending to be something he actually wanted to be was just asking for it.

You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.

she had something I could not have, and so I resented her—but I realized the fault was mine and not hers.

When I was a child I spake as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things.

Education should be the handmaid of citizenship.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

But even when I do give interviews, I always come across as such a completely different person. It seems like there's no controlling it anyway.

We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.