“You’re always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.”

Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.

You can’t win for losing. Either you fulfill their stereotype of being a radical 60’s person or you’ve sold out. In fact, of course, millions of people who were active in the 60’s are doing work on issues that try to reflect their values.

I don’t feel that it was violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily–obviously not completely–moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.

Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.

There are plenty of mothers who should not be allowed to raise their children.

Freaks are revolutionaries, and revolutionaries are freaks

I guess I feel very strongly that I disagree with the notion of personalizing history and movements and big events.

I don’t come from a privileged background.

I think that there is a lot going on with young people today.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable… those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive.

The real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world.

I wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture,

This tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better,we’ve called the military error.

The ’60s are presented to kids today as a commodity.

Killing a cop just because he’s a cop, that’ll happen. And that should happen. And there’s nothing inhuman about it at all. It’s survival. It’s the most human thing in the world.