Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.

I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.

I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.

His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.

Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.