It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live].

I'm wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I'm that way too. So I don't find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I'm not a liberal.

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?

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

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.

I'm anti-establishment. So all the labels, the reason that I keep joking and rejecting this idea that I'm liberal, well partly that's because I think of myself as a radical, and by that I mean, not even in the terms of Left-Right that you might imagine - but someone who wants to go to the root of problems.