[I wanted] to play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible.

I've I call [Cardinal John O'Connor] from time to time and he calls me. And when I think there's something he ought to think about doing, I call him and he usually does it.

I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.

I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.

We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.

When [Bill Clinton] was running for president. I'll never forget this one. He was running in New Hampshire. He was not doing well. And he suddenly, over a weekend, rushed back to Little Rock to execute a guy who had killed a cop, but in the process, the policeman had shot him in the head and he was out of it. He didn't know today from tomorrow, good, evil, whatever. His lawyer begged - his lawyer was an old friend of Clinton.

In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.