When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.

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.

I nodded, pretending to be a hundred times more courageous than I felt.But that was the thing about courage. Sometimes you had to fake it to feel it.

My music, my songs are 100 percent inspired by girl power.

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

Nothing short of the Almighty Power of God can Save us - it is not in our Numbers, our Union, or our Valour that I dare trust.

We are a nation of laws.

Someone else would come, another self that was a little more refined, that had a little more purity, a little more humility, because I was quite egotistical, I thought I was quite wonderful.

You always have to know when to bow out. You bow out while you are on top.

Nobody writes a book to get rich. It's like speaking.

In high school, I always dressed to impress the girls.

When I told my wife UConn would win the Big East tournament, she wanted to know why a team from Alaska got into the Big East tournament.