I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle, but where to blow it.

I think we have systematically and critically harmed ourselves and many young people by advising them not to try things.

We are missing Michael. But we do know we had him, and we are the world.