The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

The little man is still a man.

I think everybody deserves an equal amount of appreciation whether how old they are, but I mean, I’m cool with the praise. I’m good.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

I want a president with a record of public service: someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase form and fortune for ourselves; we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

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

Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.

I think politicians really go with the tide.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

The assertion that ‚all men are created equal‘ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

As soon as I got out there I felt a strange relationship with the pitcher’s mound. It was as if I’d been born out there. Pitching just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Striking out batters was easy.

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don’t believe in climate change – they think oil will last forever.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church – things like that – I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

I realized quickly what Mandela and Tambo meant to ordinary Africans. It was a place where they could come and find a sympathetic ear and a competent ally, a place where they would not be either turned away or cheated, a place where they might actually feel proud to be represented by men of their own skin color.

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

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

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

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

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

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

We don’t want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful – not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

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.‘

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.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.