I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution.

I got a job as a children's librarian at PS 175 in Harlem, and that changed everything. That was an epiphany. I didn't know Harlem existed. I didn't know there was such a place, because I grew up in white Queens, where five miles is 100 miles.

The only way not to be afraid is to join with other people who are also afraid.

You've got to learn to handle the press because god knows the government does all the time.

There's a lot of active radical thought today but not much action.

There are lawyers who believe in client-centered representation and who are dedicated on the same level I feel I was dedicated.

Lawyering is very individualistic. There are lawyers who are going to be that persistent birddog, they're never going to give up on the client, they're going to defend people.

The prosecution makes all the important decisions: what's charged, how much is charged, whether you can get a decent offer. Every defendant becomes an informant today.

I would never defend a cop - though I did on a few private cases, when cops were acting not as cops but as private citizens.

I couldn't add my talent, which is prodigious, to a defense of someone even accused of hurting a child.