Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. The business class is combined with the evangelicals. And I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ. So they are very happy about what we're doing to Iraq - and the menace we present now for Syria and for Iran - because they think that the apocalypse is an important thing to get into so that they can see vindicated their most literal interpretation of the Bible.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.

Reagan was conservative, but he didn't approach global management with an unbending religious zeal.

Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.

Condelleza Rice and Colin Powell are both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti [2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country. They're frauds.

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.