You encouraging me means more to me than you can imagine (After Jimmy Carter hoped Booker run for president). - Cory Booker

Immediately I knew that was problematic [being paired on a television show with John Lewis]. Because the show starts with our bios, and it starts with, ‘John Lewis, hero of the civil rights movement stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. … He literally bled the southern soil red. And then it goes to me. ‘Cory Booker, riding his Big Wheel in affluent suburbia, falls off and skins his knee: He bled the New Jersey soil red.’ And so you are very aware if you were born after the civil rights movement, if you were born in my generation, that you stand on the shoulders of giants.

I don’t want a Disneyfication of our history. I don’t want to whitewash history. I don’t want to homogenize history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.

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.