Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.