I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

In this nation, the greatest of all nations, there are no second-class families. That is our great American conviction.

Let us nurture the practice of family values, by embracing policies that value families.

Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn't change the old racial order. I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.

When you're smart on crime, you start off by recognizing that both the victim, first of all, the victim, but also the person who did the crime are both human.

I train my kids to dream really big and impossible dreams and to pursue them doggedly.

We really have to, as a country, recognize that school is where people get their identity not just as a scholar, or a future business person, but as a citizen. And we need to make sure that schools set them up for success as citizens.