“If you’re going to help somebody, sneak in, sneak out, do what you can. I just sneak along and do my thing and meet wonderful people, some people I’ve never met, new friends.”

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.

It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

That’s in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn’t work, but it’s very hard to predict what will work.

I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.

The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.

The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan’s home.

One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.

If we don’t help each other, who will?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

There can be no greater act of kindness than to help others when your own world has been destroyed.

We’re evolving as a culture as well and as more equality gets supplanted in society, well, in the U.S. anyway, it’s only helping women. We do have much more work to do though, in spreading awareness about where we fall short in our culture and in other cultures.

In American Society today, we need to have volunteerism. I truly believe that it is the glue that will hold us together and it will be the energy that will take us into the 21st century.

You try to do something every single day that will help an American or maybe someone overseas.

Regular practise of yoga can help you face the turmoil of life with steadiness and stability