“The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.”

[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 don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.

It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.

I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

Before every game I used to go out and shot the same shots over and over and over. In the summer time I spent a lot of time just shooting. So really it just came natural.

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

You’ve got to have them down before you can even think about playing.

As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

I’ve played for the Miami Heat my whole career under Pat Riley. Mr. GQ himself. So when I pick out my outfits before a game, I’m already feeling confident. And some of that swagger stays with me when I take the court.

One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.