“The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women”

While we breathe, we will hope.

I’m a warrior for the middle class.

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women

You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

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.

He is poor who is dissatisfied; he is rich who is contented with what he has, and he is richer who is generous with what he has.

When I was younger, the pressure was just being cool. I never thought of myself as a cool guy. I always thought of myself as more of the goofy guy.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. The status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.

The truly self-possessed, however, are free from the whims of fate and chance. Calmly, they affect their will, and with strength of character and purity of intention, they attract to their person solely positive outcomes.

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.

Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.

Circumstances do not shape us so much as they reveal us.