If, in [Federal Housing Administration] application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Don't let the fear of losing them keep you from loving them.

All the world talks, knowledge or information, takes you nowhere unless it’s applied into life. It’s only the experience, which allows you to see, beyond the present state.

May be you have already reached your target, but if you don’t know this, you will move away from your target!

I don't think I'd ever get thin, but I don't see why I should necessarily think that I couldn't You can't live your life for your routines.

Mr President, the president is dead.

I think all the characters in 'American Horror Story,' which is why I love it, are looking for some sense of meaning, and also it's their form of happiness.

I cook a lot. I'm always experimenting. I'm not much of a recipe follower.

We must stop planning, plotting and scheming, and let Infinite Intelligence solve the problem in its own way.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it; what is happening in America is that those parades are getting smaller and smaller - and there are many more of them.