What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.

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.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

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?

Andrew Breitbart, self-described media mogul, had several screws loose or missing and was the grinning bomb-thrower of the radical right. He was the attack dog kept on a tight leash and brought out on special occasions to hiss and to menace.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.