“all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”

“Words do inspire. ”

“A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.”

“Yes We Can!”

“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”

“I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.”

“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”

“A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.”

“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”

“I've got daughters. Nine years old and six years old. First of all, I'm gonna teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them PUNISHED with a baby.”

“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”

“of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went”

“For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon.