I think we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments.

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet.

Nonviolence is based on recognizing that all of us are human beings. And at a certain point we begin to learn that you don't gather very much by making enemies out of people and not recognizing their humanity.

Wage work is disappearing. I didn't make the jobs disappear, but they have disappeared. And people are forced to be looking for other alternatives.

I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge.