If we cannot provide excellent educational opportunities to all children, safe communities, quality health coverage, or robust and fair avenues towards wealth creation, then our nation will increasingly be in peril.

We need to be acting responsible as adults, and I don't endorse in any way the irresponsible use of marijuana. But I do believe we have come to a point in our society where we need to end prohibition. We need to have taxed, regulated marijuana within American communities.

Don't let your inability to do everything undermine your determination to do something.

Never let your soul be silenced. Live life out loud. Every day tell your truth not with words but with actions from your heart.

We started America with the sin of slavery that led right into the post-reconstruction period which was the greatest period of domestic terrorism in our country's history. Then after that, we had Jim Crow emerge and just when the Jim Crow laws were ending came the onslaught of the drug war. Well, the drug war has so perniciously effected, insidiously infected communities of color that in some ways it has come full circle, and we now have more African Americans under criminal supervision than all of the slaves in 1865. This is a profoundly unjust war.

The change we seek for our nation is not the choice of an individual but must be the calling of a country.

The right attitude can transform a barrier into a blessing, an obstacle into an opportunity or a stumbling block into a stepping stone.