There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

If someone says: "I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture," he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now.

I feel, as a matter nearly of faith, that if you have known a certain amount of suffering and have emerged out of it into the light, you are obliged to share that light with as many of the still-beleaguered as possible.

In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.