I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there’s more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we’re doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.
Nixon probably was a nice guy.
Terrorists destroy randomly.
The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.
I didn’t kill innocent people.
Chicago ’68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I’ve talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.
Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.
I was involved in the anti-war movement.
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
Andrew Breitbart, self-described media mogul, had several screws loose or missing and was the grinning bomb-thrower of the radical right. He was the attack dog kept on a tight leash and brought out on special occasions to hiss and to menace.
I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.