I've never had any trouble opposing people I've been close to. I've never worried about offending or bothering people I feel strongly about.

Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness

One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.

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.

We've been taught in America that big is best. That's why people have to believe that they must live in the greatest country in the world, which is absolutely idiotic.

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

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.