After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.

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

The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.

The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave.