I truly do live my life a day at a time. When I talk to people trying to get through anything, it's a day at a time. If people stop to think, "It's going to be potentially three years and 10 months for the new president to come in," that's a very long time and that can have major effects on somebody's psyche. But if you take this thing a day at a time, and break it down a little differently, and do what you can do today, it will make it easier for people to move forward, and it makes it easier for me to move forward.

I truly do live my life a day at a time. When I talk to people trying to get through anything, it's a day at a time. If people stop to think, "It's going to be potentially three years and 10 months for the new president to come in," that's a very long time and that can have major effects on somebody's psyche. But if you take this thing a day at a time, and break it down a little differently, and do what you can do today, it will make it easier for people to move forward, and it makes it easier for me to move forward.

I know from my own life that you can’t move forward unless you reach out and deal honestly with the past. The truth is that when it comes to race and class, Boston has a lot of unfinished business. We must not be afraid to talk about it.

The majority of people who come to America come for a better life, just like the Italians, the Jews, the Irish, and the Polish did in generations before. A lot of the Irish came here back in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century because there were no opportunities and no options at home for them. There were no jobs and there was extreme poverty. They came here to be able to send money back home.

When you go to urban America and you look at cities around America. People are moving back into the cities at record numbers. In the 1980s it was a flight to the suburbs. And now in 2017, it's a flight back into the cities.

I'm personally asking each and every single Boston resident to look after their neighbor.

Even though we all might have differences, there's commonality in the sense [that] people are hard-working, people want to raise a family, people want to put a roof over their head, people want to put food on their table, people want good things for their children.