I went through the communist children's movement at the age of nine, in 1930, and into the Young Communist League in 1936. The Spanish civil war brought me back. I'd already broken with the communists - or the Stalinists, more precisely - in 1935. But the civil war in Spain and the desire to aid the remarkable people struggling against Fascism brought me back to the Young Communist League, so that I could effectively participate, however far removed from Spain, in their struggle. By 1938 I was ready to be expelled. By 1939 I was expelled.

I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.

I've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.

My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.

Take a very striking case in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. [Vladimir] Lenin created an alleged workers' party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.