I was prepared to fail. I was prepared to not be able to get things accepted, because I saw that happen to my mother.

No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.

I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.

So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.

On the Freedom Rides in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a state trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die.

You must find a way to get in the way, you must find a way to get into trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble.

There are many battles. There’s so much that needs to be done. We need to protect the environment. Save this little planet. Not just this little piece of real estate we call America, but save the planet.

Buying art…. But it makes me happy!

Participating in a transformative movement that advocated human dignity and changed America forever.

Jim Lawson. Jim Lawson was an unbelievable human being. Born in Ohio. He was a pacifist. He studied Gandhi. He was part of the Methodist Student Movement. He lived in India. He became an organizer for FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.