I do think [Barack Obama's] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He's counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.

Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, "How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?" It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.