Diplomacy, if properly practiced, is not just talking for the sake of talking.

I've speculated about what my life might have been like as a musician, but I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that I probably would've either been teaching piano or maybe gotten to play at Nordstrom's department store.

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.

I think there are plenty of men out there who are capable and accomplished in their own realm. You don't have to be in the same field. I've often been asked, "Didn't you want to get married?" And of course I wanted to get married, but you have to fall in love and want to marry a particular person. You don't get married in the abstract. So, although there were people I felt I might have married, it just never happened.

In the segregated South, education was almost like armor. It was a way to put yourself in a category where even with the slings and arrows and humiliations of racism and segregation, somehow you had better control of the situation. I always said my parents understood that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but they and their parents believed that you could control your reaction to your circumstances.

We still go out and elect people who we think are going to govern and better our interests. So we may not have the same confidence in the people we elect, but we still go out and elect them.

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.