We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children, who are advantaged, aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who struggled more.

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.

Men's competitive team sports focus on the balance between individual achievement and team achievement with the emphasis on team achievement.

To be honest, I think for part of my late teens my character didn't really develop very much. I was in a state of cold storage.

Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.

We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today.

I don't like literal spaces, I don't like literal anything. I still like some kind of guess work but some pieces work and they just pop.

Life is a constant back-and-forth. We take a breath in and then we breathe out. The same is true for the culture as a whole.

Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it.

The idea of working with Steven Spielberg was very attractive. He's such a master. He knows the language of the camera and of filmmaking, which gives him a great freedom.

I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.