“What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.”

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

We live by the paradigms we know.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.

Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

When they go low, we go high.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

When I was a boy, I would ask about my family history, about my bloodlines. We really didn’t know that much. We had a little Indian in us from the Oklahoma Trail of Tears.

In Positano, I like the San Pietro Hotel, which is run by a friend whose family has owned the hotel for more than 100 years.

Nothing separates a woman or a family from God’s love. Not death, and certainly not divorce.

I look and there’s our boy from Vietnam and our daughter from Ethiopia, and our girl was born in Namibia, and our son is from Cambodia, and they’re brothers and sisters, man. They’re brothers and sisters and it’s a sight for elation.

I hate the word surrogate, because what does that mean? Like when people talk about I`m my father’s confident, at one point, they were actually saying major newspapers were publicly were writing that I was Vice Presidential candidate. I`m saying no. I`m a daughter.

A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss. That’s the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.

God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length.

Spare the rod and spoil the child – that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.