I have not settled down with a life partner.
The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don’t want to lose that.
We are all innovators, we all like to use our imagination, which is our greatest tool.
When we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities.
Americans are losing faith in this country’s ability to work for them.
We live in a nation where, when New Jersey figures out how to do something and does it well, and shows progress, it affects other states.
If I just retweet the nice things, it rings hollow after a while.
I’m bothered when people don’t understand that they have an obligation to use their best measure of devotion, of resources, to sacrifice for the common good.
My simple point is that I judge a person’s faith by how they live their life, not by the tenets of their religion. I’ve watched the holiest of people walk past somebody in need or treat their staff mean. To me, the beauty of faith is only seen when people live it consistently or struggle to do so.
My grandmother from Iowa, she is dancing in Heaven at the prospect that the next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The gay people with whom I am close are some of the strongest, most passionate and caring people I know, and their demands for justice are no less imperative than those of any other community.
The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.
I am the descendant of slaves, of people that were born from a slave and a slave master.
My parents were obsessed with my education.
Do not forget from whence you’ve come.
We have had in our nation a well-celebrated Declaration of Independence. But our success as a country will depend upon a new ‘Declaration of Inter-dependence.’ A belief in how much we need each other, how much we share one common destiny.
Our platform emphasizes that a vibrant, free and fair market is essential to economic growth.
Life is about, every single day, getting up to manifest your truth.
I’m worried about privacy issues, I’m worried about Russian attacks. They literally, if you if you look at what their insidious aims are – to divide this country, is to make us hate each other, to make us not to trust media.
I know Donald Trump. I’ve met him; I know his family. I have love and friendship and affection for his family members. But I’m going to work very hard to ensure that he is not our president.
Government has got to open up and engage citizenry as partners.
If we’re concerned about climate change as a country, we should have policies that make sure our great-grandchildren have a planet that’s healthy and strong.
After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents’ example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.
People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.
If we are going to do big things in our country, we’re going to have to think about better ways working across our differences.
My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the ’60s, at a time of incredible activism.
Tolerance says I am just going to stomach your right to be different. That if you disappear from the face of the earth, I am no better or worse off. But love – love knows that every American has worth and value, no matter what their background, race, religion, or sexual orientation.
We choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing together. We choose American economic might and muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle class.
You are more beautiful than you realize, stronger than you know, more powerful than you could imagine.
I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.
I’m a person that’s grounded in faith and believe that my core values, motivation, inspiration, draw from a conception of the world in that way.
I spent eight years living without heat and hot water.
I love mayors.
In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat – a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship.
Life’s too short not to try different things and to see what works for you and your body.
I debated between law school and divinity.
You can be like a thermometer, just reflecting the world around you. Or you can be a thermostat, one of those people who sets the temperature.
While most men don’t have first-hand experience with gender-based discrimination, we can still be powerful allies for advancing women’s rights. We need to do a better job of listening to women and standing up for what’s right, even when it’s not popular or comfortable.
I think a lot of folks are beginning to feel that the forces that are tearing us apart in this country are stronger than the forces that tie us together. I don’t believe that.
I live in Newark. My family lives in Newark. I own a house in Newark.
Don’t give in to cynicism. It is a toxic spiritual state.
The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it’s incredibly healing.
You’ve got to be one that, wherever you are, like a flower, you’ve got to blossom where you’re planted. You cannot eliminate darkness. You cannot banish it by cursing darkness. The only way to get rid of darkness is light and to be the light yourself.
If we cannot provide excellent educational opportunities to all children, safe communities, quality health coverage, or robust and fair avenues towards wealth creation, then our nation will increasingly be in peril.
Cities can become the engines that fuel our nation’s growth and prosperity, and they can be wide gateways for families to achieve their own American dream of prosperity.
I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.
To me, feminism is believing in women’s equality, and I ardently ascribe to that belief.
We need to create an economy that works for everyone, not crony capitalism and unchecked corporate consolidation.
Gender equality has long been at the forefront of my mind, and I think the Me Too movement has elevated many men’s consciousness, my own included, about how to be better allies.
I reject the idea that the guy who comes out of Yale and goes to work in the projects in Newark is good, and the guy who goes to work for a white-shoe law firm is bad. We’re all mountain rangers. We all have peaks and valleys.
You should be able to afford health care for your family. You should be able to retire with dignity and respect. And you should be able to give your children the kind of education that allows them to dream even bigger, go even farther and accomplish even more than you could ever imagine.
People who get comfortable in their spirit miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world.
The richness of America is that we are diverse. We’re not Sweden. We’re not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don’t confront the real racial realities that still persist.
As a vegetarian eating a plateful of eggs, I found myself in this weird place where I didn’t want to think about where those eggs came from. I didn’t want to think about the treatment of the animals who produced those eggs. When I find myself trying not to think about things, it seems to me that I’m practicing avoidance.
If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.
I have got the job of my dreams.
When American citizens pull together, there is little we can’t accomplish.
The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America’s poor; America’s minorities; and often, unfortunately, America’s vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.
It takes too much energy to hate.
There’s too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
May we all, as a nation of believers, fight for the achievement of America; may we make sacrifices worthy of those proud men and women who fought for us, labored for us, bled soil from the beaches of Normandy to the fields of Gettysburg for us.
More than anything, we must do better for our children’s education.
Equal protection under the law – for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation – should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.
My father was not going to let me sit back and just consume my blessings. He wanted me to contribute, and to do that, you have to be mission-oriented.
When they told me I couldn’t sit on the Senate floor with an iPad – that the technology wasn’t even permitted – I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.
