“Music is a universal language.”

Sensible people have got to work together.

Too many of us still believe our differences define us.

Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

When you make mistakes, when you’re wrong, you should admit you’re wrong and ask people to forgive you.

There should be a graphic novel dealing with the contribution of the women of the civil rights movement, to tell their story.

The vote controls everything that you do.

Even in the civil rights movement, there were so many unbelievable women. They never, ever received the credit that they should have received. They did all of the, and I cannot say it, they did all of the dirty work. Hard work.

I believe that teachers – whether in elementary schools, at the secondary level, or at colleges and universities – every teacher deserves the Nobel Peace Prize just for maintaining order in our schools!

We built a coalition of conscience, and that we can do it again, and we can go forward, and help redeem the soul of America.

You cannot give up – you have to be persistent and keep pushing, and press on.

Sometimes I feel like crying, tears of happiness, tears of joy, to see the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made.

Non violence as a way of life, a way of living, not simply as a technique or a tactic.

Say something. Have the courage. Have the backbone. Get in the way. Walk with the wind. It’s all going to work out.

You have to have the capacity and the ability to take what people did, and how they did it, and forgive them and move on.

Every single vote is precious.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Only where there is language is there world.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

Experience is always larger than language.

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.