We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.

A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

I believe in a passion for inclusion.

We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship, and if that happened, then they wouldn’t be prey to the employers who say, ‚We want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.‘

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

I have learned from personal experience that putting trust in God means there will be some unanswered questions. That was a hard lesson for me because I naturally want to understand everything… to know what’s going on so I can feel like I’m in control.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

I love diversity.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

I believe in the spirit of equality and the spirit of this country as one of love and compassion and kindness.

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

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.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

I am a strong believer that without justice, there is no peace. No lasting peace, anyway.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

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

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

I’ve said very clearly, including in a State of the Union address, that I’m against ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and that we’re going to end this policy.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.