I'm from a lower middle class background all my family were immigrants.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week the minimum wage family leave health insurance Social Security Medicare retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

To be sure the response of faith to revelation which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain you gain all if you lose you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He exists.

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week at a national citizenship conference I organize thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash and where previously the brain held a dead fact the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

This has been a learning experience for me. I also thought that privacy was something we were granted in the Constitution. I have learned from this when in fact the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.

In my family there was one cardinal priority - education. College was not an option it was mandatory. So even though we didn't have a lot of money we made it work. I signed up for financial aid Pell Grants work study anything I could.