It was actually fun to write [memoir], because I went back to interview people my parents had taught or who had worked with them, and I learned a lot about them that I hadn't known.

Most days are not overwhelmingly successful in your life. And what really marks whether you're going to be successful is how well you deal with the bad days, not how well you deal with the good ones.

Every life is worthy and every life is capable of greatness. We have an obligation to make sure that opportunity for greatness is there.

Today's headlines and history's judgement are not the same.

What surprised me was the angst at our democracy. And I understand it - I teach at a university and feel it in my students - but what I've tried to say to people is that we have amazing institutions, but nobody ever said we were perfect. We struggled before and we're struggling now, and we're going to struggle every day. We're a work in progress. That's why the American experience is so important for us to remember, and for us to be a beacon for others to enjoy those same rights.

We're in a new world. We're in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn't act.

Most middle-class Americans, even working-class Americans, encounter each other across racial lines all the time, but it gets really hard-core when you get into that witches' brew that is the combination of race and poverty.