The first thing I would do would be to move forward with an agenda to make sure that we give D.C. the opportunity to elect its own representatives and have some political power on Capitol Hill.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

There's something quite special about a granny's house. Even if ten or twenty or thirty years go by, you never forget how it smells.

Pain is the root of knowledge.

The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.

I always believed in love, compassion and a sense of universal respect. Every human being has that potential.

And God, God who believes in us all. And who's given me this moment, in this lifetime, that I will hopefully carry to the end of my lifetime into the next lifetime.

I learned basic cookery from my mom, taught myself cake techniques and then got fed up with my own cakes not looking as good as the ones in the shops.

probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.

The disconnection of Church and State was a master stroke for freedom and harmony.

I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.

Cruelty practiced as a matter of social principle or public policy, and presented to the community as a means to a higher goal is the most obscene and decadent phenomenon of any civilization.