“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!”

“Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.”

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”

“I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”

“Change is never easy, but always possible.”

“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening

“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

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

“I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.”

“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”

“There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills.”

“For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. So let us mark this day with remebrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled.”

“Be conscious of God and speak always the truth,”

“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

“Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk.”