As a child the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive to search and to take risks knowing that if I failed I could always come home to a family of love and support.

The breakdown of the black community in order to maintain slavery began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

I think illness is a family journey no matter what the outcome. Everybody has to be allowed to process it and mourn and deal with it in their own way.

When I got Jacob's Latter I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be 'out of there.'

Before this government came to power many failing schools were simply allowed to drift on in a pattern of continuing failure. The government is determined to break that pattern and is successfully doing so.

I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure you learned as I did in art school to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

The things I was allowed to experience the people I was able to call friends teammates mentors coaches and opponents the travel all of it are far more than anything I ever thought possible in my lifetime.

I think men are allowed to be fat and bald and ugly and women aren't. And it's just not - there is no equality there.

You see Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa and if we're honest conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.