The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.

I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.

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.

So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible.