The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

We have sex education - I'm for it, I'm not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it's young people's job to invent it themselves. You're not going to teach them; they're going to reinvent it.

I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

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.