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.

We are special because we've been united not by a common race or ethnicity. We're bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.

On Thanksgiving I will stop to give thanks that my family is safe and healthy especially because I realize that following the tragedies of this year it is all too real a possibility that they might not have been.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith so we had to do something.

Hope is the belief we might get it done and faith is the knowledge we will get it done.

I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart such as I have felt it since my childhood.

Doing films in Latin America is like an act of faith. I mean you really have to believe in what you're doing because if not you feel like it's a waste of time because you might as well be doing something that at least pays you the rent.

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

Lets have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.