Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

We talk about what's important to Hispanics: education, family, creating an environment in which you can achieve what you want to achieve because there aren't going to be obstacles in your way.

I grew up so poor in Austria that we never took a vacation with my family.

I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV.

My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.