Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.

The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?

It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

Really, people are not a school of fish. Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

I think we have to understand that the nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.

When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born.