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

“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

“I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.”

“And that’s the work of your generation. As long as more walls still stand...We’ll need more of you, young people, who imagine the world as it should be; who knock down walls; who knock down barriers; who imagine something different and have the courage to make it happen. The courage to bring communities together, to make even the small impossibilities a shining example of what is possible.”

“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”

“Change will not happen if we wait for another person or another time. We are the person that we are waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

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

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“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.”

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

“Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.” 

“What matters is how well we have loved.”

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works”

“Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.”

“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”