“Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting – it’s exciting to be in that dialogue.”

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

This man is a war criminal.” My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.

I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.

[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them – if McCain had been elected we’d still be where we are on gay rights.

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.

Without a doubt. It’s woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we’re told these guys are lazy, they’re uneducated, they don’t care, they don’t have any political instincts – just like the working class in America, apparently – and then suddenly what the hell happened?

If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.

We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.

I feel that when you have a passion and you are real.

The thing is, when you put a button in someone’s hand and give them the power of yes or no is a shorter word. People just say no.

We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It’s a perfect marriage between fact and fiction.

I use music really as a form of raw expression; escape from the real world.

It’s what we live for, to be able to make great illusions.

I can play a lot of things, but I haven’t mastered any one.

And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

When you are dealing with real life, there is no way to control it.