So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest

I do think that our freedoms are at risk.

The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.

I love being around people who work with their hands, who do the hard things to keep our country going. They're just my kind of people.

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.

I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I'm on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that's your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.