“People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.”

One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.

I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.

If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life – you might want to – –when I read these to my students, they think it’s Malcom X because it’s so radical.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

Where’s the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows.

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.

When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.

I don’t regret setting bombs.

She said she was approaching forty, and I couldn’t help wondering from what direction.

[Calvin, who has the chicken pox, calls Susie on the telephone.] Susie: Hello? Calvin: Hi, Susie! It’s me, Calvin! I was wondering if you’d like to come over and play. Susie: Why, sure! Boy,

Happiness doesn’t come from living a lukewarm life, always wondering what could have been. Happiness comes as a result of being in our natural state of growth and living up to our fullest potential.

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

I can’t help but think that it was on purpose, to attract the prince’s affections. No matter what I do, I’ll still have the fate of a girl who just keeps getting hurt, wondering if she can be happy in this pointless, one man show?

Just wonderin’, waitin’, worryin’ about some silly little things, that just don’t add up to nothin’.

I keep wondering if everybody on the political left had someone who they were separated at birth from.

Here you are, another heartache to guard under my wings as I wait wondering when it’ll be time for me to fly.