My abiding faith in the American people is undiminished. That's still what drives me every single day.

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.

A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

I sing against emotional dictatorships, and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.

You cannot make a social-consciou s picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale - definitely.

I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way.

You have a lot of young people who still feel somewhat marginalized, even if they do vote for Hillary Clinton.

The living voice is that which sways the soul.

The victims of problems of the family are the children. The children. Even of problems that neither husband nor wife have a say in.

He is born in vain, who having attained the human birth, so difficult to get, does not attempt to realize God in this very life.