I think now, with our technology, our capacity to grow food, our ability to stop raping the Earth and destroying the ecology and killing off fellow creatures, we have a chance to bring a new harmony and a new path to human development.

America can no longer afford to be as arrogant as we've been. We can no longer exempt ourselves from the global family of concern.

Since I have escaped the harshness of the economic bounds of poverty, I have stayed very connected to it spiritually. I reside and live and go and socialize and exist among those who suffer daily from the relationship that they have to poverty, Black men and women who are incarcerated. Actually, all people who are incarcerated, not just Black.

I delighted in the music of Africa, the earliest of the slave plantation songs, the transformation into Christianity and all that Christianity brought to the lives of the Africans who were forced to come to America.

Although we had a lot of villainy here in America, Adolf Hitler was certainly the most visible illustration of what would happen if fascism went unchallenged.

Through electing officials that will protect the Constitution and commit themselves to the rights of the people and the health of the nation, we will be able to ensure that no group of ideologues and no private sector institution can coopt our rights, take us into senseless wars and steal the nation from its people.

We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended.