My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.

Politicians are conservative by nature.

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 proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.