“I find some unity with Ron Paul.”

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.

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.

Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.

If we were talking about one of their sin issues we wouldn’t have addressed this at all. I find that hypocritical and inconsistent.

It’s hard not to be excited when you’re going to find a way to land on the moon.

Old is unwanted. You don’t find Thais going to the thrift store. They want new clothes. They want the newest cell phone.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Some Italians are geniuses, but you have to find a balance.

You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation.

I used to say I wanted to genuflect to a woman, put her up on a pedestal higher and higher, way up beyond my grasp…Then I’d find another one.