“Wonder is the mother of all science.”

Hear you don’t believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time.

There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

Hunger not to have, but to be.

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on general principles.

We may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.

To me faith means not worrying.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.

To me, faith means not worrying.

My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.

My mom, Nellie, got me a rosary at church. I don’t use it to pray before a competition. I’ll just pray normally to myself, but I have it there in case.

I am not, at the end of the day, a mother, a wife, a writer, an activist, a friend. I am a child of God. That’s who I was when I came into this world and who I’ll be when I leave it. No one can take that from me.

I realized I didn’t just want to parent children in my own little home but to mother the whole world. What’s the point of gaining influence if you’re not going to use it?

I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

Being a mother is a little like ‘Groundhog’s Day.’ It’s getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again and again and yet again – and it’s watching it all get undone again and again and yet again. It’s humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.

What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.