Influence is like a savings account, the less you use it, the more you've got

Any racial reconciliation we've had in this country has come not out of confrontation but out of a spirit of reconciliation. If we continue to practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we'll eventually end up with a land of people who are blind and toothless.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.

I would define morality as enlightened self-interest...That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.

Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.

Nobody Black had learned anything from the `Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the `I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.