“For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.”

I can tell you about health care and also about the financial reform bill. The Barack Obama, the President personally and his administration officials at his direction were very much involved.

This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it’s expensive to boot.

The best humor is offered up to you by the stupidity of your opponents.

I believe it is a good thing to get rid of Gaddafi. But does America have to do everything?

I don’t think Donald Trump is the right person because I very much disagree with him.

I do not believe that the federal government should treat adults who choose to smoke marijuana as criminals.

I think there were two criticisms you can make of Donald Trump’s involvement in the Health Care Bill. First of all, there were times when he wasn’t being helpful. Secondly, there were times when he was trying to be helpful. I’m not sure which one did more damage.

But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.

In a free society, a large degree of human activity is none of the government’s business. We should make criminal what’s going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.

When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate…because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.

Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

As the sun eclipses the stars by its brilliancy, so the man of knowledge will eclipse the fame of others in assemblies of the people if he proposes algebraic problems, and still more if he solves them.