“In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.”

“On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.”

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”

“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!”

“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”

“A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

“I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him, it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and in that insisting on getting my own way all the time without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself. ...In one form or another, it is what we all must go through in order to grow up.”

“Kalau mereka tidak berakar pada tradisi mereka sendiri, mereka tak akan mampu menghargai kebudayaan orang lain.”

“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”

“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”

“Negara yang tidak bisa mengendalikan sumber energinya, tidak bisa mengendalikan masa depannya.”

“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”

“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening

“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”