No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

Sometimes the idea of living as a hermit appeals to all of us. No demands, no needs, no pain, no disappointments. But that is because we have been hurt, are worn out.

I never thought I would be in a comedic role; my past is in drama.

Unless you're really going to have a serious relationship, don't bring your kids into it. Don't show your child that people come and go.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

I never have sought the world; the world was not to seek me.

I think of myself not just as a dreamer, but as a dream chaser.

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

If you love it, you don't know much about typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and you should get another hobby.

If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.