Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

It angers me to see armed defenders at the bottom of Lost Cause statues, adding a renewed threat of violence to icons that are themselves part of an ideology of violence and intimidation.

If those people survive, others will be emboldened. If they don't, others will be intimidated.

Voter caging and voter ID laws exist to disfranchise voters.

I have the greatest appreciation for Governor [Sarah] Palin and her family. There's great joy to know them.

Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.

In spite of every sage whom Greece can show, Unerring wisdom never dwelt below; Folly in all of every age we see, The only difference lies in the degree.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

When you believe it, it becomes self fulfilling.