Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

I wasn't thinking about history. I was thinking about how we were going to end segregation at lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.We would have never thought about making history, we just thought: Here is our chance to get out our sense of rejection at this kind of racial discrimination. I don't know that there was a time that anybody growing up in the South wasn't enraged about being segregated and being discriminated against.

Luckily, I had incredible parents who, when they saw a problem, didn't say, "Why doesn't somebody do something?" They would say, "Why don't we do something?".

The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.