Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.

I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.

I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.