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

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.

[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he's saying, I'm not for gay marriage because I'm a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know, I mean, what's he doing now? He's evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ's sake! And this is a guy - the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he's our guy.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.