When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.

I always felt growing up that in the South there was evil but also good - so much good.

I would say the country is a different country. It is a better country. The signs I saw when I was growing up are gone and they will not return. In many ways the walls of segregation have been torn down.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That's completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can't do that.

There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots. Others that are who, more chivalrous, are willing to admit that women have as much right to act, think, and speak as men.

Praying men are God's agents on earth, the representative of government of Heaven, set to a specific task on the earth.