Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
You really can change the world if you care enough.
The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be, our ideal of freedom and justice, how we were going to be different, and what the American experiment was going to be about.
Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
People who don’t vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.
We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
Don’t feel entitled to anything you didn’t sweat and struggle for.
A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back – but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.
I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.
Just because a child’s parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.
The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.
Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it’s the bedrock security of community that we and our children need.
If it’s wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it’s wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.