Facts about Al Sharpton

"I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values"

"If O.J. had been accused of killing his black wife, you would not have seen the same passion stirred up"

"I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan"

"Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era"

"If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way of your own cause"

"If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?"

"I won vice president of my student body in high school. That doesn't mean anything"

"Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance"

"We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances"

"My ordination in the Church of God in Christ was at age 9, and I later became a Baptist minister, which I am today"

"I've seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining"

"The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house"

"National Action Network, the group I founded, has affiliates or chapters in over 40 cities around the country"

"James Brown became my father. He would talk to me the way a father talked to a son. He became the father I never had"

"It seems some have chosen to ignore or have simply forgotten the big-picture vision promoted by Dr. King and his kin"

"I've seen too much in life to give up"

"I've never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known"

"I'm a patriot in the truest sense of the word"

"I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag"

"The promise of America is one immigration policy for all who seek to enter our shores, whether they come from Mexico, Haiti or Canada, there must be one set of rules for everybody. We cannot welcome those to come and then try and act as though any culture will not be respected or treated inferior. We cannot look at the Latino community and preach "one language." No one gave them an English test before they sent them to Iraq to fight for America"

"The boxing world is full of all kinds of corruption"

"One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself"

"My ministry's always been one of social activism. I think a responsible minister must be at some levels involved in the social order"

"If you can get the proper definition of trouble, then we can find out who the real troublemakers are"

"I do believe the Democratic party has moved far to the right. I do believe that the party has a bunch of elephants running around in donkey clothes"

"How do you make things fair?"

"Who defines terrorists? Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend"

"It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us"

"I was the first candidate to come out against this war, spoke at every anti-war march"

"I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy"

"Evangelicals catapulted George W. Bush back to the White House"

"During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians"

"Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls"