We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.

I do not bring any professional knowledge of the issue to bear, but what I do bring to my consideration of immigration is a deepened and highly sensitized feeling with those persons who feel alien in our country. I can feel the strangeness they feel because it is something I have experienced in a different area.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

"We, the people." It is a very elegant beginning. But when that document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not included in that "We, the people."

The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual.

If you had to work in the environment of Washington, D.C., as I do, and watch those men who are so imprisoned and so confined by their eighteenth-century thought patterns, you would know that if anybody is going to be liberated, it's men who must be liberated in this country.

Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment.