One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team. - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostages to the waves and currents.

I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people have to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court. If they took to the idea that they could escape poverty through education, I think it would make a more basic and long-lasting change in the way things happen. When we set up unrealistic goals and then don't achieve them, that's another example of internalized defeat. What we need are positive, realistic ideas and the willingness to work. Hard work and practical goals.

"Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor."