It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.

There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

It wasn't [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying, "I didn't want her to miss tonight! I wanted to be able to tell her!" And to see all these people, a Hispanic cop dancing with an old white woman, wow! I mean, that's the world I want to live in, and because it's the world I want to live in, I had a hard time leaving.