In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.

If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life - you might want to - –when I read these to my students, they think it's Malcom X because it's so radical. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.

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

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.