The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.

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'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].

When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama. So that's kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would've said, "I don't have any politics. I'm a business person." Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.

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