My finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.

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.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.

each morning we’re born againof yesterday nothing remainswhat’s left began today

What is it about your race that none of you can seem to properly weigh your own value? Every human seems to think more of herself than she should, or less of herself than is sensible!

If we can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it because the answer is not separate from the problem.

I didn't have the same fitness or ability as the other girls, so I had to beat them with my mind.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.

One of the paradoxes of globalization is that, in the developing world, we've seen massive reductions in property.