The stain of prejudice is often indelible.

For me the great shame and dolor of our times is the story of immigrant children.

Poverty remains the biggest assault on the dignity of our people.

I know the moment we’re in; you know the moment we are in. I know the stakes; you know the stakes. This is far from over. And finally, we’re confronting the stains of what remains — the deep stain on the soul of the nation: hate and white supremacy [...] that hate never goes away. It never – I thought — in all of the years I’ve been involved, I thought once we got through it, it would go away. But it doesn’t; it only hides. It only hides until some seeming-legitimate person breathes some oxygen under the rocks where they’re hiding and gives it some breath.

The treatment of the Negro is America's greatest and most conspicuous scandal. It is tremendously publicized, and democratic America will continue to publicize it itself. For the colored peoples all over the world, whose rising influence is axiomatic, this scandal is salt in their wounds.

Of all the world's evils, child abuse may rank as the greatest.

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.

a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death.

The foundational crime of this country is indigenous genocide.

What happened here is the most significant, as it is the most devastating human thing that has happened in America since Sherman marched to the sea.

While we were growing up, the biggest insult for us was when dark emigrant forces called our homeland an unnatural, artificial creation. When we grew up, the biggest insult for us was when we realised that was true.

Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.

There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.