When American citizens pull together, there is little we can't accomplish.

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.

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.

Generations of heroic Americans have made America more inclusive, more expansive, and more just.

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

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.

Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others.

We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America's greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty.

When I go about my own politics, I meet Tea Party supporters who I can work with in Congress, that I find common ground with. I find Tea Party supporters who won't let me get a sentence out without judging me. To say that there is a 'Tea Party supporter' is a gross generality.

The issues we hear Donald Trump talking about are just so contrary to who we are as a people. They are an affront and an insult to our higher angels and our best selves.

Elections have consequences. So many people want to complain, but they don't want to vote. We can talk about Hillary Clinton. We can celebrate her; we can support her, but if we don't come out and vote for her, for shame.

We must be agents of love.

We're not called to be a tolerant nation. We're called to be a nation of love.

What we need to do is understand that we have to love each other, that we have to see each other have worth and dignity and value.

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.'

If we invest in ourselves, the collective good, we all thrive.

People who get comfortable in their spirit miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

In life, you get one choice over and over again. That is to take conditions as they are or take responsibility for changing them.

I believe that living life with a definiteness of purpose, with having a central focus, is essential to success.

Stand in a way that you are always empowering people to join in, because the only way to be truly successful is not to succeed as an individual, but to succeed as a part of a community, of a country.

This world has a way of trying to homogenize you. Trying to sanitize you. Trying to scrub you of your unique divine genius. This world wants to make you regular.

It's incredibly flattering to be a U.S. senator, which I want to stay at for a long time.

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.

Do not forget from whence you've come.

My family is no different from yours. We may be different from the geography that we come from. Some of you all may pray differently than I do, some of you all may be from a different ethnicity, but we all have the same story.

Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.

Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right.

As a guy that had been told to drop out many times as I was coming up, I don't think you should tell any candidate about what they should do and what decisions they should make.

My weakness in life is two men who seduce me all the time - named Ben & Jerry.

If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.

Minorities do not believe this country will give them a fair shake.

I love mayors.

In Newark, we see a problem and want to seize it, but we run up against the wall of state government, the wall of federal government that does not have the flexibility or doesn't see problems, even. At the federal level, it's often a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. At the local level, it's just not local that. It's win-win-win.

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.

If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.

The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don't want to lose that.

More than anything, we must do better for our children's education.

We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.

The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.

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.

Athletes are still exploited. If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don't meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don't get their degree.

We're a nation of hope, of high ideals.

We've got to be entrepreneurial; we've got to be innovative, and we've got to figure out ways of getting things done that people might think are very unorthodox.

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

I'm very knowledgeable of the challenges before me.

My whole life has been about confronting cynicism.

I spent eight years living without heat and hot water.

I have not settled down with a life partner.