And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years.

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.

I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you'd have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn't drop out and run away.

The First Amendment means everything to me.

The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place.

As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.

I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980.

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.

Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.

Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches - the grassroots - kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well.

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybodys rights. That these rights are not divisible not something men have and women dont and so on.

The civil rights movement didnt begin in Montgomery and it didnt end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

Marriage is a civil right. If you don't want gay people to marry in your church, good for you. But you can't say they can't marry in your city.

I did work out every day. I needed it to have the endurance to do what needed to be done and not get hurt. I have such a new respect for action stars now.

I mean the only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it.

My favorite singer to this day is Nat King Cole. I've tried to emulate his phrasing. It is so absolutely beautiful to listen to his lovely voice.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

I think I've become a much better singer and a much better player. Years and years of playing a couple of hours every day will do that.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

George Pal had total control, and he was there on the set every day. You never met a more charming man in your entire lifetime - what a lovely gentleman.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Depending on what day of the week it is and what time of the month it is, I'm a good friend or not a good friend. I'm more or less a good mom or not a good mom, more or less a good mate or not a good mate. That's just life, whether or not you're public.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

A play is much easier to maintain your personal life with because if you're rehearsing, you're working like from 11 to 6 or 11 to 5 and you get to have your whole morning and your whole evening. When you're doing the play, you have all day.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I'm working harder than ever now, and I'm putting on my pants the same as I always have. I just get up every day and try to do a little better than the day before, and that is to run a great restaurant with great food, great wine, and great service. That's my philosophy.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

The day cold and fair with a high easterly wind: we were visited by two Indians who gave us an account of the country and people near the Rocky mountains where they had been.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

The Pawnee chief had left the village the day after the doctor arrived, with 50 or 60 horses and many people, and had taken his course to the north of our route.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.