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

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.

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 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.

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.

Bush people didn't like him, and they never liked him. They didn't like him because they don't like democracy. They like you to have an election, but they like you to elect the people they want you to elect.

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.