When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people’s children, I’m doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.

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

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 feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

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

The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.