"The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up."

"People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety."

"The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa."

"The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?"

"Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change."

"The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."

"He who conquers his inner doubts has already won half the war. Reflect upon this whenever doubt clouds your horizon — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art."