“I’m a warrior for the middle class.”

No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children’s hands early and often.

We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up.

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.

Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security.

Greatness is never free; it must be earned.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

Find somebody to be successful for. Raise their hopes. Rise to their needs.

Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.

The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

I think I have learned that the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.

You must understand the troubles of that man farthest down before you can help him.

I don’t need help because if I can’t help myself I can’t be helped.

Lay hold of something that will help you, and then use it to help somebody else.

Part of the broader task of Christian scholarship is to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith; as Anselm put it, ours is a faith that seeks understanding.