To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

It is in the roots, not the branches, that a tree’s greatest strength lies.

The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.

If the men in the room would only think how they would feel graduating with a 'spinster of arts' degree they would see how important this is.

I stand upon a block of stillness. It is more secure than any sidewalk. I bring with me my own sidewalk.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

America as we know it will end unless we end Medicare as we know it.

If family or friends are unwell or ill - it's perhaps the only thing that really can make one feel vulnerable.

Thinking instead of acting is the number one golf disease.

The essence of the miracle of forgiveness is that it brings peace to the previously anxious, restless, frustrated, perhaps tormented soul.

I don't need the perfect one, I just need somebody who will make me feel like I'm the only one.