Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.

I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.

If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

The film's title You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. comes from something I used to say in teaching my students "This is not going to be a neutral class." The world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don't want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that's the origin of the title.

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.