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.

I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.

I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.

Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently. It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It's kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.