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.

The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.

If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!