I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.

Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.

Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.

I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.