We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.
When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people’s children, I’m doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.
Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.
We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.
Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or help you sleep at night.
So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.
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.