You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.

Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.

I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.

I also grew up with community co-parents who looked out for each other. They looked out for children and tried to be the hands of God. They tried to live their faith.

Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.