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

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

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.

What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.