If I'm here, I'll be trying to be a better human being, a better writer, a better friend and a better beloved.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

When you learn, teach, when you get, give.

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

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

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

I know, that since life is our most precious gift, and as far as we can be absolutely certain, it's given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity, and ignorance, and in our last moments we can say: 'All my life, all my conscious energies, have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit - beginning with my own'.