What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

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.

Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.

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.

We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can't the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It's a captured system.

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

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.