Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy.

The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.

As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

Service is the rent we pay for living.

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.