I don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.

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

I'm not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he's doing what he said he would do.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

I don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.