I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.