Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

Standing as I do, with my hand upon this staff, and under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Death wasn’t part of God’s original plan for humanity, and the Bible calls death an enemy – the last enemy to be destroyed.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

I think the whole stigma of ‚black movies‘ is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like ’12 Years A Slave,‘ to ‚The Butler,‘ to ‚The Best Man,‘ to ‚Ride Along,‘ to even ‚Think Like a Man‘ from last year – these movies are just good movies.

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.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

To the best of my judgment, I have labored for, and not against, the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us is the difference of circumstances.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

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

The American dream belongs to all of us.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

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

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

There’s no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively – I am one with the people.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‚our‘ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

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

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

We want justice, but at the same time, we gotta love and come together and bring unity, and I feel it’s gonna happen.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

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.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

I think that there’s no doubt that as I see friends, families, children of gay couples who are thriving, you know, that has an impact on how I think about these issues.