I'm aware that because America is so powerful - with its tentacles reaching out to the world - one doesn't escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life.

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 think the business community knows that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the scramble for what remains.

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 can't think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he's the worst American President of all time.