Hope is the best contraceptive.

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.

Service is what life is all about.

Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.

Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.

You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class.

We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.