I've always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I've worked with over my career with whom I've not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person.

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it.

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've opposed black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and rightist regimes. I'm close to Aristide because I have respect for him, but all that is beside the point.

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 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 all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.