To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.

What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.