So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

Service is the rent we pay for living.

There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.

People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.

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.

You can't be what you can't see.

The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.