As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve ca...
The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the...
To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying I have recently finished your remarkable book The Americ...
We have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a fill the jails cam...
Various identity struggles... have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more of victims of 'isms' (racism...
With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and...
I also gained a deeper appreciation of what it must have been like for my mother to be in a foreign country unable to speak the language (in her case, unable to read or write any language). As I walke...
What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to acc...
Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after h...
In the 1950s Detroit was undergoing changes in the city and factories with enormous political consequences. When I arrived in Detroit the city had just begun Urban Renewal (which blacks renamed Negro...
In the 1950s I rarely went to a community meeting without Jimmy and would usually just listen or ask questions. Now, having worked in the city and socialized with Jimmy’s friends and Correspondence re...
A human being, Einstein concluded, is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the...
Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the righ...
Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washi...
Looking at Moby Dick as a mid-twentieth century revolutionist who was also a lover of Shakespeare, he had come to the conclusion that Melville’s masterpiece was the first comprehensive statement in li...
Look on yourself as a citizen in a kingdom of persons, he advised. Act always as if the maxim of your action could become a universal law, always treating mankind, as much in your own person as in tha...
I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new a...
In times of crisis you either deepen democracy, or you go to the other extreme and become totalitarian. Our struggles for democracy have taught us some important and valuable lessons. Over a million c...
If we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.
How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolutio...