“I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.”

You cannot teach what you don’t know. You cannot give energy if you’re not on fire on the inside.

A check or credit card, a Gucci bag strap, anything of value will do. Give as you live.

I think the pain is subsiding. The back is getting better.

Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight.

Some people’s lives are worthy of taking the time to say goodbye to.

When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn’t put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.

Just because a chicken was born in the oven doesn’t make it a biscuit.

A new leadership. A choice. A chance. Don’t cry about what you don’t have. Use what you got.

No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.

Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow – red, yellow, brown, black and white -and we’re all precious in God’s sight.

I hear that melting pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven’t melted.

We were fundamentally the same. They expressed their anger more willingly. We developed the capacity to internalize our anger, using a nonviolent discipline.

The only justification for ever looking down on somebody is to pick them up.

Tears will get you sympathy, sweat will get you change.

In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

The invasion only made matters worse. The occupation will not work, Iraq is unoccupiable, that will not work.

To have a developed intellect is always helpful if one can enlighten it from above and turn it to a divine use.

Until the reality of equality between man and woman is fully established and attained, the highest social development of mankind is not possible.

To doubt the experience is to discourage it. Let it be developed, see what is in it.

Of course education becomes very very important and that’s for our human resource development.

Political development should start at the grassroots.

If I have this child? Why wasn’t it obvious to me that I already had a child, who was growing inside of me?

To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.

Once you are pregnant, there is no if. That child, though tiny and in an early stage of development, already exists!