"I think he is going to face some of the toughest challenges of any president that has ever been elected. Not only is he cleaning up eight years of someone else's mess, but he also has to forge a path for his own self. And that is a lot to put on somebody. Make no mistake about it, there are going to be some hard times ahead. But it is just like with a relationship or a marriage: You have to strain something to its breaking point in order to know how strong it is."

"I think after the Civil War was a different day. I think after the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown versus Board of Education in '54 was a different day; this is now a different day, too. This is our third historic fundamental change in race relations. My hope is that this is the last time we really will have to have a fundamental change, and this will be the one that will end it."

"It is like the coming-out party. You don't have the coming-out party for the kid that didn't graduate. They have gone through the steps and they have stuck it out and here we are. Now, of course it is not perfection. We are never going to see total perfection. We are humans bent to error. But America has expressed a change that has been taking place for a long time. America is saying our motive and our missions are right."

"If 50 years from now the greatest memory and significance of Barack Obama is that he was the first black president, it won't count for very much. It would be like saying the greatest and most significant memory of JFK was not the Cuban missile crisis but the fact that he was the first Catholic president. So at the end of the day, it is going to come down to performance."

"We can't have any more excuses. White people can't say, 'These children will never amount to anything.' And black people can't say, 'You don't understand.' There can't be any more excuses for either race. . . . I think this election has proven that excuses are no longer acceptable."

"The identity of a president doesn't necessarily translate into a wholesale change in the politics of the country. I think presidents are subject to huge social institutional barriers."

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