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.

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.

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

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

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.