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.

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factorites, whose lives are filled qith cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.