You have to have a habitual vision of greatness ... you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity ... believe in fact that living is connected to giving.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.

Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition.

For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am.

I think Martin Luther King would always keep track of collective insurgencies among poor and working people. He was concerned about the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union, for example. He would have closely followed the Arab Spring. And certainly he would be very critical of the massive surveillance state that has emerged in America in the last five to 10 years. He would have approved of the movements trying to gain some accountability in U.S. foreign policy, such as drones being (used) on innocent people. I think he would march against drones.

Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.