Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

I wasn't thinking about history. I was thinking about how we were going to end segregation at lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.We would have never thought about making history, we just thought: Here is our chance to get out our sense of rejection at this kind of racial discrimination. I don't know that there was a time that anybody growing up in the South wasn't enraged about being segregated and being discriminated against.

We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.