I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.'
I am a geek nerd who happened to have a temporary period of jockiness.
I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn't defeat the British, it didn't get us to the moon, build our nation's highways, or map the human genome. We did that together. This is the high call of patriotism.
I'd gladly take a grenade, if it meant saving Newark.
I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.
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.
If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.
We're heading towards a perception tipping point where it's going to soon become a foregone conclusion that not only has Newark turned a corner, but it's way down the right road.
These are the themes in life which are consistent in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism - of being grounded in who you are and being engaged in an unjust world.
When I do my hiring in the United States Senate, I look at issues of diversity.
If I just retweet the nice things, it rings hollow after a while.
Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.
I spent eight years living without heat and hot water.
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.
I don't know what God has planned for me or you or anyone, but I do know that in darkness, you discover an indistinguishable light.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. We inherited the best infrastructure on the globe from our grandparents... and we've taken that inheritance and squandered it.
As soon as I got out of law school, I went to inner city Newark, New Jersey, to become a housing rights lawyer, because people fought for my housing rights, I was going to pay it forward by fighting for others.
As a government leader, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines and watch all these other sectors innovate. I'm going to do everything I can as a leader to be in that innovation, to be a provocateur for that innovation.
We are all innovators, we all like to use our imagination, which is our greatest tool.
Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas. We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.
