You really can change the world if you care enough.

I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.

I try to act out of faith.

I'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.

In politics, there are no friends.

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

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.

Service is what life is all about.

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.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.

I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents.

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.