“In the future, when we see a black kid in a hoodie, let’s say: There’s the next Mark Zuckerberg.”

“I never realized how much of a racist I was until I went to the Oakland Hackathon. I thought that if we escaped the evening without a fist fight breaking out, it was a success. Then it hit me. It was was what President Bush called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. What these kids did was amazing. Amazing.”

When I was at Yale law school, 90% of my classmates were non-violent drug offenders. But they did not end up in prison”

“The only place in the country that has momentum right now is Silicon Valley. When you visit Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC or the rest of the country, you don’t see it.”

“Washington doesn’t do change well. I debate Newt Gingrich on CNN every week… and I don’t feel like I am changing his mind.” (I tried)

“As a black man, I can say that Martin Luther King gave a terrible speech in Washington. Just terrible. He spoke about the turmoil of the past and present. Then, a woman who had heard him speak before said ‘Tell them about your dream Martin.' And then, Martin Luther King pushed his notes aside and ignored his closing paragraph and went ‘off the dome’ to improvise the most important performance of slam poetry in American history.”

“The history of America is the convergence of the founding father’s reality with their dreams.”