We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.

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.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Everything we encounter can have a positive influence in shaping our life when we adopt a lens of Gratitude.

I could write shorter sermons but when I get started I'm too lazy to stop

Great masters neither want nor need your worship. Your greatest gift to them and yourself is to emulate their divinity by claiming it as your own.

Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning.

He who jumps for the moon and gets it not leaps higher than he who stoops for a penny in the mud.

... deprived of pain, and also deprived of danger, able to do what it wants, [Nature] does not need us, nor understands our deserts, and it cannot be angry.

It's a pity to shoot the pianist when the piano is out of tune.

Freedom requires no effort to enjoy but requires heroic efforts to preserve.

I'd totally be attracted to a geek girl!