“The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")”

“Boys do not long for fathers who will usher them through the gauntlet of psychological disconnect. They long for fathers who have themselves survived intact. Boys do not ache for their father's masculinity. They ache for their fathers' hearts.”

“Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today -- with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008]”

“All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father's secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn't know they were there.”

“There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.”

“The happiest men in the world are the men who swore that they would never become their fathers.That is how the alpha males became endangered. Their sons decided that they would not become their fathers,they would be decent men,they would not sleep with strangers through the night,they would instead wipe baby shit,they would know at all times the ages of their children and the names of their teachers,they would buy curtains,they would transfer food from large bowls into smaller bowls and put them in the fridge,they would not be their fathers.In a world full of new men who did not want to be their fathers,what chance did alpha males have?”