I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
I have an addiction to caffeine.
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement...
I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different.
I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.
We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it’s like being in a Days Inn; it’s very clean and very nice.
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer – a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
I’m an optimist in my heart – I’m a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother – but a pessimist in my head. I think that’s the dialectic we all need to be in.
Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
One hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead. It’s hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.