If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.

When blacks are unemployed, they are considered lazy and apathetic. When whites are unemployed, it's considered a depression.

Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.

Those powers that control the tent are not threatened at all by any activity that you engage in, in the shadows, that's not moving toward the tent. And I am rather convinced that we have a generation that is so preoccupied with life in the shadows, they never even focus on getting to the sunlight where you open up the big tent.

Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.

The great responsibility that we have today is to put the poor and the near poor back on front of the American agenda.