War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

Fear makes you worry and worry makes you weary.

How you see the world may not be how others view it.

Do you and I allow light to chase darkness from our souls as well?

Warm-heartedne ss and concern for others’ well-being are a condition for happiness, whether you are religious or not.

No man is greater than his prayer life.

I got a smoke alarm at home, but really it's more like a 9-volt-battery-slowly-drainer.

You've got a fairly good idea as to what the questions are going to be. But how to record the best answer is another matter.

From Themistocles began the saying, "He is a second Hercules."

Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.

Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.