If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

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.

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.

I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.