“I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of ...”

“We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.”

“Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.”

“I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the sta...”

“To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.”

“Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the c...”

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it al...”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

“The moral of the tale is, don't live for the approval of others. The real you is here to find out the secret of life, not to satisfy someone else's opinion.”