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You can't always measure the effects of activist work; you just have to wish and pray that the message gets through.

I think we're going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it's more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care.

I didn't wake up and decide to become an activist. But you couldn't help notice the inequities, the injustices. It was all around you.

Activism, to me, I don't know if it really works. It may work for somebody else, but it does not work for me.

Maybe subconsciously I've kept activism separate from acting because it's important to me in a more profound way.

I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.

My work always presents problems in our society. Those problems may be anything from injustice to freedom, and everything related to humanity.

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

There's always going to be a need for activism; there's always going to be a need for you and me doing the right thing, being very Lincoln-sonian in looking out for each other.