My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

Before I was born, my father told my mother, ‚If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.‘

Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

The ‚anti-globalisation movement‘ is the most significant proponent of globalisation – but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something.

When I moved out, my mom and dad came to help me get settled into my apartment – a place I ultimately got hooked up with in Coach Nelson’s building. We had to figure out how to get all my shoes over here. That was a little stressful.

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

Surely wisdom will come as we listen to learn from children, parents, partners, neighbors, Church leaders, and the Lord.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

People tell me that they are so hopeful when they see me and other children ‚school-striking,‘ and they say, ‚Oh the children are going to save us.‘ But no, we aren’t. We are too young to be able to do that. We don’t have time to wait for us to grow up and fix this in the future.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

There were some great clinicians in the 20th century – great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius – there’s a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents. Primarily because of the activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center, and in international affairs, and to some degree, domestic affairs, on energy conservation, on environment, and things of that kind.

Now we’re in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change – we’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change – inch by inch, day by day.

I like Italian movies. I was frequently there in the ’60s, in Rome and the vicinity. It was a great period in life. I was very influenced by their stuff.

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

I think the self-burning itself on practice of non-violence. These people, you see, they easily use bomb explosive, more casualty people. But they didn’t do that. Only sacrifice their own life. So this also is part of practice of non-violence.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.

I don’t think there is a single social issue I haven’t spoken on.

I don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier – the frontier of the 1960’s – a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.

I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue. When we’re young, we don’t understand why our parents bug us so much with school and doing homework, but it’s a blessing to have that support at home.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I’ve rarely kept my distance from kind of – I don’t know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, ‚Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.‘

You can rebel in different ways. Civil disobedience is rebelling. As long as it’s peaceful, of course.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.