I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life - you might want to - –when I read these to my students, they think it's Malcom X because it's so radical. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.

If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.