Lines that made me ponder -- not that I necessarily agreed with them:

There is a gap between the politics we have and the politics we need.

A government that truly represents these Americans – that truly serves these Americans – will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past.

Then came the student protests against the Vietnam War and the suggestion that America was not always right, our actions not always justified – that a new generation would not pay any price or bear any burden that its elders might dictate.

War might be hell and still the right thing to do.

Foreign policy should be based on facts and not wishful thinking.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.

I’m reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences – a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

Through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will.

All the money in the world won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work.

I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world.

And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.

American now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.

While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome” – the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”

In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.

The United States has 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world’s oil. We can’t drill our way out of the problem.

Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests that slavery is all right and eating shellfish is an abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application?

The story of Abraham and Issac offers a simple but powerful example. According to the Bible, Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his “only son, Isaac, whom you love,” as a burnt offering. Without argument, Abraham takes Issac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, we know the happy ending – God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute. Abraham has passed God’s test of devotion. He becomes a model of fidelity to god, and his great faith is rewarded through future generations. And yet it is fair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first-century Abraham raising the knife on the roof of his apartment building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child abuse. We would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself or His angels to all of us in a single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hers, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true – as individuals or communities of faith – will be true for us alone.

The average black household has the television on more than eleven hours per day.

America would never pursue the systematic colonization practiced by European nations, but it shed all inhibitions about meddling in the affairs of countries it deemed strategically important.

The more America signaled a willingness to show restraint in the exercise of its power, the fewer the number of conflicts that would arise – and the more legitimate our actions would appear in the eyes of the world when we did have to move militarily.

But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government – and between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know what they were doing – and didn’t always tell the truth.

I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.


What I could not support was “a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” And I said: I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.

Without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy – and ultimately the power – it needs to make the world safer than it is today.

But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi’s campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

When we, the richest country in earth and the consumer of 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuels, can’t bring ourselves to raise fuel-efficiency standards by even a small fraction so as to weaken our dependence on Saudi oil fields and slow global warming, we should expect to have a hard time convincing China not to deal with oil suppliers like Iran or Sudan – and shouldn’t count on much cooperation in getting them to address environmental problems that visit our shores.

33 percent of all children are born out of wedlock.

Children living with single mothers are five times more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households.

No matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own – the fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule.

If we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.

Sometimes when I listen to Michelle talk about her father, I hear the echo of such joy in her, the love and respect that Frasier Robinson earned not through fame or spectacular deeds but through small, daily, ordinary, acts – a love he earned by being there.

I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.