We're always given the message that our potential is so limited, which is so sad. Actually, our potential is infinite.
Potential is universal. Opportunity is not.
We're not products of our environments, we're products of our expectations.
Do you think that we're products of our environments? I think so, or maybe products of our expectations. Others' expectations of us or our expectations. I mean others' expectations that you take on as your own. I realize how difficult it is to seperate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.
The young men in our city are not problems to be solved. They are opportunities to be unleashed.
When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.
I began at some point to understand the whole idea of accountability and responsibility and leadership, and I think that was something that really birthed something in me, where I knew I wanted to be part of a larger equation in our society.
The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?
The starship Enterprise was a metaphor starship Earth, and the vision was that the strength of this starship lay in its diversity.
You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to me cursed by it. You said. . . I had it in my power to free myself of any curse - that curses were preludes to blessings.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.