You need to understand something, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate or care for. You have a choice in life, you can just sit back, getting fat, dumb, and happy, consuming all the blessings put before you, or it can metabolize inside of you, become fuel to get you into the fight, to make this democracy real, to make it true to its words that we can be a nation of liberty and justice for all.

Give the respect you want to receive; embody the grace you hope to encounter; and help others with no expectations whatsoever.

I still have that new senator smell.

What more could you ask for in life than to be given an impossible challenge?

May we help more than we hurt, may we seek to understand more than be understood and may we love more than we judge.

I'm a competitor. And I don't want to say, hey, just because this person is a woman or this person is a minority, that they're not going to get the white male vote.

Gender bias is real. I was an early Barack Obama supporter, and I was even shocked at the way the media treated President Obama vs. how they treated Secretary Hillary Clinton. Questions that were asked about, what is wearing, how much does she weigh, about her hair were never ascribed to the president.