The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

Nothing will work unless you do.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. Please remember that your difficulties do not define you. They simply strengthen your ability to overcome.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!

I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.

Most of my life has been spent keeping information close, turning it over and over in my mind. The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing.

There's a difference between violence and senseless violence.

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

Look upon your chastening as God's chariots sent to carry your soul into the high places of spiritual achievement.

Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

I was never a cardholder. But I was leftist in the sense that I voted communist.

Vehicular traffic is completely forbidden in the green strips, where tranquility shall reign and the curse of noise shall not penetrate.

Milkmen seem so wholesome, and there's no way anybody can be that wholesome.