I think it's impossible to predict the future but it is possible to look at the past and see how one can do differently from what one's ancestors have done and learn from their mistakes, and one can see how even though there are enormous forces which stop one doing what one wants to, there are little holes in which the individual can do something.

The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

As you grow older, you change.

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation.

I didn't grow up in one place, so I never had a certain mentality. I have some aspects of growing up in Texas, but I also have a lot of East Coast family. I would have loved to grow up on the East Coast.