Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.