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."

Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

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.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.