What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

Sometimes it feels like you've set off a spectacular lightning show in my heart, and I wonder if other people can see the flashes through my skin.

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

Photography is space, light, texture, of course, but the really important element is time - that nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass.

There are no pat answers - we're pushing through some new frontiers, and lessons of the past don't always apply.

Remove failure as an option.

I want to dedicate the rest of my life to spreading the love of Christ. Because God has done so much for me and has given me this platform to speak into millions of lives, I feel it is my duty...

Say whatever you want. But the United States has a kickass military and really good bullshit marketing people. If this country was a person it would be a used car salesman with a flamethrower.

Every man's the same, he wants the sunshine in his name.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

I'm more into kind of real stories, psychological movies.