The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.