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.