It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently. It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It's kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.

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.