My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.

We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.

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.

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

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.

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