The Rev. Wright, in his own words
"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. It is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition."
On Obama's denunciation of some of Wright's remarks:
"He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. ... He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia, where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician."
On anyone who says he's unpatriotic:
"I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over on certain channels. I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
On whether he should apologize for shouting in a sermon "God damn America" for its treatment of minorities:
"God doesn't bless everything. God condemns some things. And dem, D-E-M, is where we get the word damn. God damns some practices, and there's no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic."
On the black religious tradition:
"I come from a religious tradition where we shout in the sanctuary and march on the picket line. I come from a religious tradition where we give God the glory and the devil the blues. The black religious tradition is different. We do it a different way."
On the sermon he gave after Sept. 11 saying "America's chickens are coming home to roost" after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and "supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans":
"The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. What is not the failure to communicate is when something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and ... looped in the face of the public. That's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or, as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a 'wack-a-doodle.'"
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While the focus was on Vice President Kamala Harris in their first media interview of the presidential campaign, Walz was asked if voters could take him at his word.
