“I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.”

“The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that's the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.”

“Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.”

“In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle”

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”

“To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.”

“When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country."- Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream”