Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.

Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

Waging war is not a primary physical need.

In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.

But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.