Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.

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.

We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay - it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.