There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard.

I still have a 15¢ sticker on the frame of my law degree. It's tainted, so I just leave it in the basement.

As much as I hated the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, I couldn’t bring myself to hate my own country, then or later.

But what I believe is that if a person’s individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don’t issue mandates to businesses that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.

Oh, I don’t think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That’s not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he’d prefer me to do it than somebody else.

I’d been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it’s at the bottom. It’s the people who are in school systems that don’t educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They’re people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do.

I think Juan stopped short – he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I’m not a nationalist.

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I’m supposed to think.