The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.

Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.

Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.

Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.