“The US is indeed a terrorist nation. …It’s also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.”

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.

That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

The audience is like my instrument. It’s not just me up there, it’s collaborative.

I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

If you’re going to help somebody, sneak in, sneak out, do what you can. I just sneak along and do my thing and meet wonderful people, some people I’ve never met, new friends.

Even there, [Barack] Obama’s generals, his Pentagon, they’re telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us.

Let’s enjoy this world. Let’s enjoy one another. We are meant to love one another, not to hate one another.

Moreover, his ferocious slide playing motivated Clapton to turn in some of the finest guitar performances of his career

Nothing fruitful ever comes when plants are forced to flower in the wrong season.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I’ve never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

… Geniuses have a little extra something. There’s that little something that you know is a little different.

I know that’s a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in.

It’s an honor to be compared with Terry Bradshaw. If I could do half of what he did, I’d be very happy.

I like to work quickly; I never like to waste any time. I never write half a song and come back to it later at all. It all has to be done at once. I lose interest if it doesn’t.

Conventional history completely ignores half the human race.

A half-truth is usually less than half of that.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.

(I’m) the only one to take out half a brain, although you would think, if you go to Washington, that someone had beat me to it.

A singer has got a different attitude, they’re they’re so whacked out they don’t know what they’re doing half the time. Singers, they don’t, they’re spoiled too.