Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.

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.

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

I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents.

If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.

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.