Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

Expressing truth is hard work.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

Go to school to make a living. Learn about yourself to define your life.

Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

With virtually no knowledge of or interest in history, the masses simply take their unprecedented high living standards under capitalism for granted.

If I saw an ugly bird but she was a celebrity, she wouldn't attract me at all.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

To convert somebody go and take them by the hand and guide them.

For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge.

We are here for an education.