I'm wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I'm that way too. So I don't find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I'm not a liberal.

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

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

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

I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.