Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.

Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation's history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God.

I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ.

Democracy requires that if you who don't like the outcome of elections you have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the next time around.

I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.

I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied.