I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.

At the time there was a hospital strike in New York and the Catholic hospitals were part of a general consortium, and the head of the consortium had decided that they were finally going to replace some of the striking workers. And I hear [John] O'Connor yelling, `Over my dead body will you replace any of those workers! They have a right to strike.' So I figured, `This is interesting.'

A.J.[Muste] died in the late '60s, I think. He was 81, something like that.

Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is not hard to do.

He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this [ invasions of privacy ]. So all in all, [Barack] Obama is a disaster.

I say personally because I am 84 years old, and [Barack Obama's] is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.

I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him.