Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

Fear sticks like a barb in the mind. Someone cold enough to take advantage of it can attach strings to those barbs and make puppets of men and women.

If you live life so cautiously as to never fail, you end up failing at life itself.

The life of a writer is directed by a mad impulsive muse, that can tell them to cancel all their storyline: a creative divergent devil.

Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.

Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.

Being a control freakis a sign of a vulnerableself-esteem. The betteryou feel about yourselfthe less you need to controleverything around you.

This isn't all going to be done in one day, either.

and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.

There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'