The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about...?"

America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.

For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.'

I am not the 'illegal' you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.

When people call me illegal, calling me illegal says more about you than it does about me.

To be in America illegally is actually a civil offense and not a criminal one.

You have to stand for something bigger than yourself.

I have no control over what people call me. The only thing I have control over is my work, and that's really all I can be judged on.

To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.

I always felt like I had the word "illegal" tattooed on my forehead.

Life is boring when everything is perfect. Life is exciting and joyful when we continuously adjust and change to overcome the imperfection in life.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.

I want to see you shoot the way you shout.

Life don't care 'bout sorry's, " Will says. "Bad things happen, and you can't let 'em harden you. Whatever happened to yer pa, it ain't yer fault, Nate, and you gotta let it go.

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Chastity without charity is a lamp without oil.

I am angry about the world's conditions for black people.

It is precisely the despair of our times that convinces me that a renaissance is right around the corner.

Things that are real are given and received in silence.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.