“The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.”

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

I’m not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he’s doing what he said he would do.

Politicians are conservative by nature.

We’re actually saying, here’s a principle that I’d like to arc toward. That’s a very different role in life. I didn’t expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn’t expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.

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.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

I’m wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I’m that way too. So I don’t find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I’m not a liberal.

To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.

One hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead. It’s hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.

If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.

I didn’t kill innocent people.

In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn’t can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?

To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together. Humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.

Mathematics is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.

There cannot be true democracy unless women’s voices are heard. There cannot be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives.

Circumstances-what are circumstances? I make circumstances

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

I rock shows by myself. Ain’t no backup. Ain’t no help.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them.