I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.