My parents were obsessed with my education.
— Cory Booker
The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; America's minorities; and often, unfortunately, America's vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.
The beauty of having your ego checked as many times as my ego was checked in Newark made me recognize how much I needed other people who were very different than me in order to get big things done.
I spent eight years living without heat and hot water.
Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.
Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so.
The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.
The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don't want to lose that.
In Newark, we see a problem and want to seize it, but we run up against the wall of state government, the wall of federal government that does not have the flexibility or doesn't see problems, even. At the federal level, it's often a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. At the local level, it's just not local that. It's win-win-win.
Minorities do not believe this country will give them a fair shake.
As a guy that had been told to drop out many times as I was coming up, I don't think you should tell any candidate about what they should do and what decisions they should make.
My family is no different from yours. We may be different from the geography that we come from. Some of you all may pray differently than I do, some of you all may be from a different ethnicity, but we all have the same story.
It's incredibly flattering to be a U.S. senator, which I want to stay at for a long time.
This world has a way of trying to homogenize you. Trying to sanitize you. Trying to scrub you of your unique divine genius. This world wants to make you regular.
I believe that living life with a definiteness of purpose, with having a central focus, is essential to success.
People who get comfortable in their spirit miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world.
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.
I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.
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.
So many great movements didn't succeed the first time, but people kept trying and trying and trying.
My whole life has been about confronting cynicism.
We've got to be entrepreneurial; we've got to be innovative, and we've got to figure out ways of getting things done that people might think are very unorthodox.
Athletes are still exploited. If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don't meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don't get their degree.
We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.
If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.
I love mayors.
If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.
Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right.
Do not forget from whence you've come.
Life is about, every single day, getting up to manifest your truth.
You are more beautiful than you realize, stronger than you know, more powerful than you could imagine.
In life, you get one choice over and over again. That is to take conditions as they are or take responsibility for changing them.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.
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.
My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.
If we are going to do big things in our country, we're going to have to think about better ways working across our differences.
I have not settled down with a life partner.
I'm very knowledgeable of the challenges before me.
We're a nation of hope, of high ideals.
We're heading towards a perception tipping point where it's going to soon become a foregone conclusion that not only has Newark turned a corner, but it's way down the right road.
More than anything, we must do better for our children's education.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. We inherited the best infrastructure on the globe from our grandparents... and we've taken that inheritance and squandered it.
Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.
My weakness in life is two men who seduce me all the time - named Ben & Jerry.
Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.
My grandmother from Iowa, she is dancing in Heaven at the prospect that the next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
You were not built for comfort and convenience. You were built to overcome.
Stand in a way that you are always empowering people to join in, because the only way to be truly successful is not to succeed as an individual, but to succeed as a part of a community, of a country.
I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.
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.
