No life's worth more than any other, no sister worth less than any brother.

I went to the University of San Francisco on an athletic scholarship. I didn't study in high school. I was just there to get by and to play basketball. But a funny thing happened to me when I got to college. I got challenged by the work and the professors.

I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.

Be who you are, nothing more... nothing less.

It's also hard for me to understand growing up not knowing where I came from. I searched for my parents - I started when I was twenty; I found both my mother and my father when I was twenty-two. Trying to catch up on twenty-two years that we can never get back, trying to reconcile that - that's a hard thing for me.

We don't have to be good, you know? No one's telling us that we have to do good things, but we do them because we know it makes other people feel good and it makes us feel good.

When I first started out, I thought it was enough to make an angry song that pointed out the problems of the world.