Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

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.

Never say never

What kind of person is void of compassion? A heartless one. But alas, compassion cannot exist without the endurance of afflictions.

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.- Aristotle

I think whatever comes natural is probably the truth, and the truth is the strongest form of anything - whether serious or funny.

You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.

I am someone who hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.

Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure - just a big field to wander in.

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

The best sermon is preached by the minister who has a sermon to preach and not by the man who has to preach a sermon.