“I know that’s a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.”

The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.

Without a doubt. It’s woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we’re told these guys are lazy, they’re uneducated, they don’t care, they don’t have any political instincts – just like the working class in America, apparently – and then suddenly what the hell happened?

If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.

We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.

I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.

It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.

I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

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?

Little by little deep inside us, the diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are.

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible …

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren’t any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don’t buy that because I’ve seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit’s not in there.

The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts.

I think it’s offensive to equate evangelical Christians, Catholics, others that view marriage as between a man and a woman, as being racist.

Only see you when I close my eyes. We on borrowed time when I delayed the sunlight.

You can tell how boring a person is by the lack of fear in their eyes when someone is flipping through photos on their phone.