“Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats – the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms – while the field hands are left with the scraps.”

I really believe that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.

I was not a public – I was not a thinker. I was a doer.

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths – half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does.

In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That’s why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.

In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror” – exactly what, pray tell, is that?

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.

Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions – the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who’d rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.

Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there’s no use even trying.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

What I know of the divine science and holy scripture, I learnt in the woods and fields.

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields

Don’t try to be a jack of all investments. Stick to the field you know best.

It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.

Men and women succeed because they find a field of endeavor that matches their interests and abilities.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.