“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.”

The essence of American racism is disrespect.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.

[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.

It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.

And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.

Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.

We believe in equal rights for all people in all nations. If Israel, the United States, Russia, Pakistan, other countries, China, have the right to have a nuclear program and nuclear bomb, Iran, too, must have that same right.

Like, how does age and circumstance equate to some kind of personality trait?

Sadness doesn’t equal weakness, sweetheart. If anything, it shows the love you have inside of you, and nothing stronger in this world exists.

Now you have the equal opportunity to equip yourself through information and knowledge and express yourself as an independent mind.

Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.

The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonnably require that it be respected by others.