This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn't really jibe with the experience of most people.

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.

Whether your pleasing or pissing everybody off, your doing something wrong.

Marriage is a great institution but I'm not ready for an institution.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

Once you become very powerful and advanced, you must be willing to go back to school and start over, and go to a wise person who will show you the way. Very few people are willing to do that.

with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.

Goals are new, forward-moving objectives. They magnetize you towards them.

To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

The entire Universe is condensed in the body, and the entire body in the Heart. Thus the Heart is the nucleus of the whole Universe.

There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.

My child, what I want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel, inside which dwells a mind of the same material as that of which the thunderbolt is made.