My whole family is missing that sports gene. I hope I didn't screw that up by marrying a great golfer.

Waking up sober is a good day. I love being able to wake up and do positive things, to go to the gym.

I realize I will always be the poster child for police brutality, but I can try to use that as a positive force for healing and restraint.

I'm a religious person. I remember my mom told me: 'Vengeance belongs to God. It's up to him to wreak vengeance.' It's hard for me to get to that point, but that's the work of God.

As far as having peace within myself, the one way I can do that is forgiving the people who have done wrong to me. It causes more stress to build up anger. Peace is more productive.

One of the things I do is try to get a positive message out there in the local schools and tell my story. I also do a lot of faith-based speaking, sharing my story and testimony, to help show what God has done in my life and what he can do in others' lives.

Many times, the decisions we make affect and hurt your closest friends and family the most. I have a lot of regrets in that regard. But God has forgiven me, which I am very thankful for. It has enabled me to forgive myself and move forward one day at a time.

No matter what we face, put your total faith in God, and in time - not our time, but His time - He'll bring us through.

The beauty of the World Cup is that while thirty-two countries get to cheer for their respective teams, the event also affirms a global pluralism - it is as much a festival of cultural multiplicity as it is a competition featuring some of the best athletes in the world.

Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.

The benefits of prison education go beyond lowering recidivism rates and increasing post-release employment. It can also rekindle a sense of purpose and confidence.

The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.

Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.

The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.

As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.

'A Talk to Teachers' showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is.

In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.

Sometimes sports serves as a reprieve from politics, and sometimes it serves as an extension of it.

There is a solidarity that black people can find in celebrating the athletic success of our own, especially in sports where our existence is sparse.

In general, for me, a big thing in my life has been just sort of learning what true self-esteem is and what true positive self-image is. And being a dancer, and growing up in that world, you're so focused on yourself, and you're so focused on achieving goals, on finding perfection, and working on your craft.

Music videos are notoriously long, not fun, grueling. You are known there as a dancer and it's kind of sad because dancers, in a lot of ways, are under-appreciated and kind of under-respected when it come to that so they don't necessarily treat you in a nice way when you do a music video.

Every hotel room, every apartment we rent, I am sage-ing. And I have crystals that I travel with. It just makes me feel better.

I would say I was always very ambitious and goal-oriented, but rather than being just a go-getter hustler, now I surrender a lot more and I trust my path a lot more.

I realized that if you try to be the perfect mom, perfect wife, perfect actress, you start to feel overwhelmed. You shut down. I got that really fast... I was running back and forth from breast-feeding to filming a scene, overextending myself on every level. I realized I have to make priorities, and my family is number one no matter what.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.

I want always to be positive.

Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they're doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real.

I have a fantastic relationship with money. I use it to buy my freedom.

I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future.

I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body.

I want to build a legacy at the WWE, but I definitely want to continue to grow the Bella Empire. I want it to go beyond the ring. I would love to be a motivational speaker.

I'm definitely willing to film it for sure. I feel like I've taken people on this incredible journey on 'Total Divas' and 'Total Bellas.' They have seen me cry, get angry, and be so many different ways about marriage. I feel like for my fan base, my Bella Army, I should let them tune in to my wedding.

I do not want my man to be exhausted for our wedding day, especially our wedding night.

When I saw Kate Moss's champagne tower from her wedding, I was like, 'Okay, check - I want that. I want fireworks.'

Do I want to walk the rest of my life? Do I want to not be in pain? It just sucks because I have this true battle going on in my head, and everyone keeps telling me you gotta put your health first, but there's so much of me that wants to put my career first.

Believing in yourself and having confidence gives you outer strength.

Women are taking the main stage. They are center stage, and they're setting all these records and making history, and I want I be a part of that. I've worked so hard to be a part of that.

I think just living in the day and age of technology, whether you're a celebrity or a normal human being, you're always worried about your privacy. And I think as long as you behave, you know you're OK. I think anyone worries about that.

I have to say I have an amazing therapist. She's my best friend for life. She's taught me how to balance everything out.

If you have an ongoing relationship with a person, think of everything positive about that person that you possibly can and enter your interaction from that space. Ignore all the crap that used to drive you up the wall before. You will be amazed at what a change this attitude shift brings about.

Positive thinking is so firmly enshrined in our culture that knocking it is a little like attacking motherhood or apple pie.

I am not a big fan of positive thinking. The term suggests that there is something negative that you have to counteract by being positive. That is an artificial duality.