“Your children need your presence more than your presents.”

Keep hope alive!

You may not be responsible for being down, but you must be responsible for getting up.

If my mind can conceive it, My heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it!

Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.

America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

We must somehow bring our soldiers back home and not allow them to be trophies in a growing, deepening crisis between the U.S. and China.

To call her a seamstress is irrelevant, She was not arrested for sewing. She was a freedom fighter.

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

It is in struggle and service with our brothers and sisters, individually and collectively, that we find the meaning of life.

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.

In tough economic times, desperate people do desperate things, and the abortion rate goes up.

Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.

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.

A lot of my mistakes, are birthed by curiosity. Like a child, drawn to fire; I came for the light and found pain instead.

It’s wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around.

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?

Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.

I tried to allow my children to take risks, to test themselves. Better broken bones than broken spirit.

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.