You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don't water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don't water, nineteen will die and one will survive.

Bush people didn't like him, and they never liked him. They didn't like him because they don't like democracy. They like you to have an election, but they like you to elect the people they want you to elect.

People need their history like they need air and food.

I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.

For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

I don't know of any situation where you're going to have an officeholder in a country of eight million people who's cut off at the knees by the most powerful force in this world and who can still make it fly.