Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

‚Whole Women’s Health‘ made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

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.

Let’s be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

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

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

I am deeply grateful to the citizens of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton assembly for bestowing upon me this incredible honor of citizenship. I am so proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

We can’t afford not to educate girls and give women the power and the access that they need.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Because we’re Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.

I was born realizing the flaws in the criminal justice system.

Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives.

Wealthy men can’t live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who’s spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God’s creation, woman, the object of our lust.

I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.