My top goal as your Secretary of State is to save lives by reducing fatal traffic crashes. When I established the Teen Driver Safety Task Force, the goal was to improve Illinois' graduated driver licensing law and, even more importantly, to save lives.

I tell the people that hire us, if we don't get a standing ovation when we're finished with our performance, it's free - and we've always been paid.

You cannot imagine how many people called, how many letters, how many emails. Every place I go, people ask me, 'Please, don't quit.'

I first met Dr. King in 1954 when I was a student at Alabama State University and a member of a local church down there. He was in town to organize a rally against public transportation. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, which was illegal back then.

The challenge has been, we make policy in the world of politics.

Any government cannot work or function if it does not enjoy popular support.

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.

I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.