Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.

Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” or “both”?

After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.

[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn’t want to go that far [laughs]. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.