Every major advance for justice in our country took no more than 1 percent of adults — around 2.5 million people — with public opinion behind them, mobilizing to change government policy. If you’ve got 2.5 million people, you can recover our country, recover our government, recover our hopes and dreams.

I’m not saying that race is a natural division of human beings that can lead to unjust hierarchies. I’m saying that the very concept of race was invented to create and enforce such hierarchies.

If we focus on people who are using opiates . . . we can say there’s an upsetting, awful addiction problem with them, over there, and deal with it in a prohibitive manner. In this way we minimize our vast social problems.

Our choice is clear: ignore the crisis and be swept up in a cycle of accelerating disaster, or manage a rapid decline of fossil-fuel use to avert the worst.

We develop courage by coming out of hiding, coming out of the closet, and there are thousands of closets.

White supremacy is not just Nazis marching in the street. In the U.S. it’s always been a part of the economic and social system.

To think of Amazon as a retailer is to miss the true nature of this company. Amazon wants to control the underlying infrastructure of commerce.

Our God is the God of the widow and the orphan and the stranger, a God who says, “If you harm them, their cries will reach me.”

[Black people have] learned a lot from being invisible, spit on, dishonored, and devalued. One thing we’ve learned is that when you have been terrorized, it is spiritually empty to terrorize others back.

We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.