I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

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

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.