“You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and only in the nick of time.”

I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.

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.

Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.

I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that’s always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.

I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different.

The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.

I’m writing this book right now called Pallin’ Around, and the subtitle is: “Talking to the Tea Party.” And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.

They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were – “a real threat,” you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

You have more people that love you than you know.

The most important thing for me is having a relationship with God. To know that the owner, the creator of the universe loves you, sent His Son to die for your sins; that’s very empowering. Knowing Him and knowing that He loves me gives me encouragement and confidence to move forward.

Taste goodness before you recommend it.

You may as well say, ‘That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.

You can be a victim or you can be rich, but you can’t be both. Listen up! Every time, and I mean every time, you blame, justify, or complain, you are slitting your financial throat.

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.