What is important - what I consider success - is that we make a contribution to our world.

Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don't sit around and call each other names. That's what you can find on a third grade playground.

We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it, and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

It's very important for people to know themselves and understand what their value system is, because if you don't know what your value system is, then you don't know what risks are worth taking and which ones are worth avoiding.

What a wonderful thing is to be able to contribute to the restoration of someone's health. It's not only a feeling that I'm worth something, but that I have something to contribute.

I grew up in Detroit. I grew up in an environment where you were supposed to be Democrat, where they told you that Republicans were evil people and that they were racist.