“anger's a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become and organiser. Well adjusted people find more relaxing work”

“it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

“doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

“Don’t be thick, all right? I’m not just talking about one time. Look, I ask Monica out, she says no. I say okay … your shit’s not so hot anyway.”

“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”

“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

“Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

“What matters is how well we have loved.”

“We are made for this moment, and we will seize it-so long as we seize it together.”

“What I could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics"

“A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.”

“We are the change we have been waiting for.”

“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

“Every single American — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender — every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It’s a pretty simple proposition.”

“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.”