Deval Patrick

I view the experiences that I have had - both tough ones and the pleasant ones - as gifts. They've been full of lessons. And I've learned to be open to those lessons.

The summer before my third year of law school, I worked at a law firm in Washington, D.C. I turned 25 that July, and on my birthday, my father happened to be playing in a local jazz club called Pigfoot and invited me to join him. I hadn't spent a birthday with him since I was 3, but I agreed.

I very much believe in values-based leadership and that the values that I believe in and try to govern by are transcendent values.

I remember how my dad was so into herbal solutions and health food well before that stuff became popular.

I think that hope, that ability to envision, to imagine a better way, and then to apply yourself to it, is the way to climb out of a hole, is the way to build a better life, is the way to build a better community and a better country.

I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block.

This is a horrific day in Boston. My thoughts and prayers are with those who have been injured.

If you are ever going to move beyond where you stand at that moment you have to conjure a picture in your head of where you want to go.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

We're Americans. We shape our own future. Let's start by standing up for President Barack Obama.