“There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. In order to respon...”

“Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.”

“And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't t...”

“My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those obligati...”

“Oh, I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody...”

“These guys are sitting there watching the destruction of our race while arguing about Ronald Reagan”

“We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For o...”

“The teachers complain that the students today are all lazy, ignorant, and stupid. But the truth is that you're smarter than they are. You're not even old enough to drive and you already know that n...”

“I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...”

“Whenever you don't know someone and you overhear their problems they always sound so trivial.”

“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

“There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”