I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.

I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.

I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn't like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Unless there's a grassroots movement of some sort, with TV and the media in general in the hands of fewer and fewer people - the Murdochians, you know - all we hear is the one point of view. There has to be something communal.

Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.

One day I visited a guy who had made a fortune as a broker. He was sitting in his office with his computer. I hire people from here and make deals from this room, he told me. Then he took me to the trading room. Nobody was talking to anybody else, the place was silent as a tomb, they were all sitting there watching their terminals - a great word, terminal. I tell you, it scares the crap out of me.