I think second place is always the most difficult one. It's not a nice feeling.
I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.
That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.
Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that's how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.
Are you the sum total of your worst acts?
Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.
When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.
My fear is a fear of being obsolete. This is a world that changes very fast, and one of the main human desires is to belong to, to be part of something. It's probably one of our greatest needs next to oxygen.
Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd law; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.
To know what is the right thing to do and not do it is the greatest cowardice.
That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again. " "You could be the first," he told her.