Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.

If some of these [Republican] folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the 'flat earth society.' They would not believe that the world was round.

I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.

The problem with all these tired excuses for inaction is that it suggests a fundamental lack of faith in American business and American ingenuity.

My hope is that's something [Donald Trump] is thinking about, because not only is the president of the United States somebody that the entire country looks to for direction but sets the agenda internationally in a lot of ways.

The president [Barack Obama] laid out his vision for foreign policy in a way that we hadn't heard before. And it could be summed up, I think, in two words - realistic idealism.

When you've got a economy in which 40 percent of economic growth is happening in the financial sector, that turns out that was all an illusion, that it wasn't growth based on real products and services, but just a bunch of paper shuffling and a house of cards, then what's gonna emerge, at some point, is a sense of resentment, a sense that the system's rigged, and it's not working for ordinary people. And it's not fulfilling the basic American dream.