You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

I’ve never dropped anyone I believed in.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

Our constitution is a ray of hope: H for harmony, O for Opportunity, P for people’s participation and E for equality.

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.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

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.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

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.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

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

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.

I can imagine it’s hard to make a relationship last. I wouldn’t know.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

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

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

When you’re one of the leaders of the team, there are no days off.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

I’m opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

I know I have a responsibility to the fans.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

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

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

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 think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

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.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

Absolutely not. I have no problem with commitment. In fact, I love having someone in my life.

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.

Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews – everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

Despite the slowness, the infidelity, the errors and sins it committed and might still commit against its members, the Church, trust me, has no other meaning and goal but to live and witness Jesus.

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

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

You’re innocent until proven guilty.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

All men are equal before fish.

After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.