I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'

False hope is worse than despair.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

If its danger you seek, come on over. I covet tranquility but beget the tempest storm.

I know that story, when you start a fight, the main idea is one to survive, one to be the victim and one to be the killer. This explains why FBI, CSI and DIA and other departments are here!

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Well I've always wanted to sing at something called The Houston Rodeo in my hometown, so hopefully I'll get to do that one day.

Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it's amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won't even eat.

Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.

Health and health inequalities tell us a great deal about the good or bad effects of social policies.

We got to mediate our greedy levels, Cause the lust of currency can have us sleepin with the devil.

If you believe it and desire it, you can acquire it.

When you're a catalyst for change, you make enemies - and I'm proud of the ones I've got.