“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.”

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.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.

So that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.

I don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

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.

When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war.

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.