What he [Barack Obama] does to change the world - that's what's important.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

I want people with epilepsy to know that there are ways in which they can play a role in their own recovery. It's all in how they approach what is happening and how they can use that as a catalyst for their own growth. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that people are willing to embrace you if you share your story.