As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

The white man is destroying the world.

I’ve been actually really very pleased to see how much awareness was raised around bullying, and how deeply it affects everyone. You know, you don’t have to be the loser kid in high school to be bullied. Bullying and being picked on comes in so many different forms.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Bigotry is the sacred disease.

If you see a black family, it’s looting, but if it’s a white family they are looking for food.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‚bads‘ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‚bad‘ white males. Only, when you write about ‚bad‘ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‚good‘ blacks, ‚good‘ homosexuals and ‚good‘ women?

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.

Homophobia is real in this country.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq’s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

Sexism is real in this country.

All movements go too far.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

The notion that we have even one single veteran living on the streets should be just considered a travesty to all of us.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

No one is pro-abortion.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

I am no supporter of factory labor for children, but I have never joined with those who clamored against proper work of children on farms outside their school hours.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

Freedom is not enough.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. The teaching of the church is clear, and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

Today, the news is scandals; that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

The ‚Third World‘ is a term I don’t like very much because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

I care about helping to address these problems of social cohesion and understanding what economic problems people think exist.