I have to admit that I'm one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.

[T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation.

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

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.

I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.

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.