I've gotten literally thousands of contacts from people across the country - and the most poignant ones being elderly people - who said I had given up on America and I was just waiting to die.

I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don't I talk about race that often. I said it's because I'm a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And you say - I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.

The kind of job doesn't matter. The length of time on the job doesn't matter... If you work hard and do your best, you'll be recognized and move onward.

I always say if God didn't allow any bad things to happen we would already be in heaven, and we are not there.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

I've had a lot of experience building things, organizing things, a national scholarship program.

If God thinks proportionality is fair who are we to say that it is unfair?