When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way.

I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help.

If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

I'd like to transform the system in very fundamental ways, but you've got to do that in every way that you can. You can't wait for some magic bullet or some magic politician or some magic anything to have that happen. You got to get out there and use your vote.

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

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.

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.