Cory Booker

I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.

I don't know what God has planned for me or you or anyone, but I do know that in darkness, you discover an indistinguishable light.

Stay faithful in things large and taking on the world, but stay faithful in those things small - because remember it's the small things, the size of a mustard seed, that ultimately moves mountains.

I live in Newark. My family lives in Newark. I own a house in Newark.

Let's not judge. Let's draw inspiration from each other's stories - successes and failures - and realize we're all connected.

I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.'

Newark faces real challenges.

People who get comfortable in their spirit miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world.

Life's too short not to try different things and to see what works for you and your body.

While most men don't have first-hand experience with gender-based discrimination, we can still be powerful allies for advancing women's rights. We need to do a better job of listening to women and standing up for what's right, even when it's not popular or comfortable.

We need a president that can heal, that can bring people together, that can get us back. We have so much common pain in this country that can get us back to a sense of common purpose and common cause.

We must be agents of love.

I believe there's tremendous value in having a Supreme Court with a diverse set of experiences - especially when we're dealing with issues that range from our intimate relationships to how we finance campaigns.

I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.

Americans are losing faith in this country's ability to work for them.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

When I was just a twenty-something, I came to Newark, and I found a connection to the city in a spiritual way. I found a connection here and people here that reminded me so much of my roots and my own family.

We also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and protect against those ills that destabilized our economy - like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness and common sense. Our platform calls for significant cuts in federal spending.

America has seen enough of a handful of people growing rich at the cost of our nation descending into economic crisis.

I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can.

We choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing together. We choose American economic might and muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle class.

You don't have to be one of those people that accepts things as they are. Every day, take responsibility for changing them right where you are.

Everybody wants to find their soul mate, and I'm no different. That's definitely what I want in the future.

In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat - a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship.

We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America's greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty.

In fact, when I first came to the Senate, people laughed. I had people telling me, 'There's no way you're going to get a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill done.'

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

To me, feminism is believing in women's equality, and I ardently ascribe to that belief.

May we all, as a nation of believers, fight for the achievement of America; may we make sacrifices worthy of those proud men and women who fought for us, labored for us, bled soil from the beaches of Normandy to the fields of Gettysburg for us.

You are more beautiful than you realize, stronger than you know, more powerful than you could imagine.

Do not forget from whence you've come.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Tolerance says I am just going to stomach your right to be different. That if you disappear from the face of the earth, I am no better or worse off. But love - love knows that every American has worth and value, no matter what their background, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

You can be like a thermometer, just reflecting the world around you. Or you can be a thermostat, one of those people who sets the temperature.

What happens once you get a felony conviction? Now you are entering this American caste system where you can't get a job, you can't get a loan, you can't get a Pell grant, you can't get public housing.

These false barriers that we've erected of space and race, all these illusions that we've allowed to infect us like toxins, we've got to rid ourselves of that. We are a better nation when we are ultimately united in a common purpose and a common cause.

You have to understand the Newark Riots - a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops - a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.

My faith tradition is love your enemies. It's not complicated for me, if I aspire to be who I say I am. I am a Christian American. Literally written in the ideals of my faith is to love those who hate you. I don't see why that's so shocking.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.

Small acts of decency ripple in ways we could never imagine.

In America we have a Declaration of Independence, but our history, our advancements, our global strength all point to an American declaration of interdependence.

Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

You should be able to afford health care for your family. You should be able to retire with dignity and respect. And you should be able to give your children the kind of education that allows them to dream even bigger, go even farther and accomplish even more than you could ever imagine.

You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.

If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.

You've got to be one that, wherever you are, like a flower, you've got to blossom where you're planted. You cannot eliminate darkness. You cannot banish it by cursing darkness. The only way to get rid of darkness is light and to be the light yourself.