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.

The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.

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 great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him "the great slaver from Illinois."

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.