In our resolve to build a better world... we seek to summon what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise, they will win and the decent people will lose.

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.

Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

If you expect someone else to guide you, you'll be lost.

Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.

In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

Don't you try and go through life worried if someone had liked you or not. You best make sure that they are doing right by you.

I found my voice in books.

Are you joining a conversation or taking it over? Stay aware of how you join a conversation and of your effect on a conversation.

What is the beauty of a thing if others do not take pleasure in it.

It's not going to be over until we say so.

It is hard to struggle for success but harder for survival.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

The task of a leader is to simplify. You should be able to explain where you need to go in two minutes.

But I am influenced by the world that says I influence it. The world I live in is my influence.

Being privileged to work hard for long hours at something you think is worth doing is the best kind of play.

The sentiment that I had a little trouble with was the idea that, "You change the school, you change the community." I couldn't wrap my mind around that.