I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

I've always seen the Olympics as a place where you could act out your differences on the athletic field with a sense of sportsmanship and fairness and mutual respect.

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.

I was much more comfortable and a much better congressman running in a district that was 37 percent black, where I had to have a white constituency to get elected, than I would have been if I was in a 75 percent black district.

No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.

Everybody is determined by his own experience.