I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?

Twice the Republicans in the California legislature tried to block my seating because of my trips to Hanoi.

Communism is one of the options that can improve people's lives.

We're looking at a quandary here where Bernie's [Sanders] the winner on a moral and even a political basis. He's made history, and she's the winner on the mathematical basis.

He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.

Gentrification and consumerism... have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen.