Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why'd they hate him? Because he said things like "I believe in white supremacy."

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.