Great Throughts Treasury

"I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important."

"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."

"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."

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

"In politics, there are no friends."

"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."

"It is the responsibility of every adult... to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone."

"Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved."

"I've been struck by the upside-down priorities of the juvenile justice system. 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."

"My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values."

"Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others."

"One dollar up front prevents the spending of many dollars down the road."

"No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion."

"Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes."

"Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose."

"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."

"Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society."

"Service to others is the rent you pay for living on this planet."

"Service is what life is all about; it never occurred to me not to be involved in the community."

"The 1990s struggle is for America's conscience and future -- a future that is being determined right now in the bodies and minds and spirits of every American child."

"So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible."

"Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few."

"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."

"The fact is we made dramatic progress in the 1960s in eradicating hunger and improving the health status of children, and then we just stopped trying."

"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."

"The inability to get health care because people lack insurance, kills, less traumatically, and less visibly than terrorism, but the result is the same. And poor housing and poor education and low wages kills the spirit and the capacity and the quality of life that all of us deserve."

"The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people`s children."

"There is not enough darkness in the world to snuff out the light of even one small candle."

"The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves."

"The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe."

"There's ignorance in people who just don't know that we have a national child emergency. And there are a lot of people who are conveniently ignorant--they don't want to know."

"There?s no free lunch. Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for."

"Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America."

"There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage."

"To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20."

"Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter."

"This slogan of ending welfare as we know it is not going to help the more than 70 percent of the poor who work every day. Wages have not kept pace with inflation and with changes in the structure of our economy. There are almost 38 million poor Americans, most of whom work, most of whom are white. So the way we play the race issue in these matters keeps a lot of folk of all colors in poverty."

"We are living in a time of unbearable dissonance between promise and performance; between good politics and good policy; between professed and practiced family values; between racial creed and racial deed; between calls for community and rampant individualism and greed; and between our capacity to prevent and alleviate human deprivation and disease and our political and spiritual will to do so."

"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."

"We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites."

"We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption."

"You can't be what you can't see."

"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."

"Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?"

"You didn't have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be."