That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. "The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa."

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.