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.

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.

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.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

At a hundred and twenty five miles per hour, with the wind rushing in his face, darkness around him, he is alone in the universe, but then, Zeb has been alone all his life.

Empathy needs no genius.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

You've got to sing like you don't need the money.

Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

The more these readjustments are delayed ... the longer the depression will have to last, and the longer complete recovery is postponed.

An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

An honest man is respected by all parties.