You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.

I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.

It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence.

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth.

The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.

The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth - and the courage to hope.