Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.

False hope is worse than despair.

The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.