“An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias.”

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.

To the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it’s very limited in what it can do logically. It’s an existential experience – there and then gone.

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples.

News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.

Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn’t drift; I moved left just by standing still.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience

The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch’s empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back.

Although I was brought up in a culturally and religious conservative culture, as a Baptist I was taught that no one has the right to subpoena your conscience.

You do it because there’s a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.

When I was growing up, I never heard anyone pray, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It was always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That stuck. We’re all in this together.

Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. But what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day’s work… In the world of David Rockefeller it’s hard to tell where business ends and politics begins

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

Fighting the terrorists in Syria is not only in the interest of Syria or the Syrian people; in the interest of the Middle East, of Europe itself.

I think I’m getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

[It is important] to have stability and to have security, which means humanitarian equals fighting terrorists. You cannot talk about humanitarian aid and supporting the terrorists at the same time. You cannot, you have to choose.

As long as you fight, you cannot lose… if you leave everything out there, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. To me you can never lose.

Why would Senator Allen want to oppose saving money for the state? Its simply another example of Republicans fighting the governor tooth and nail against any measure where she might be able to turn the states budget around.

Everybody knows it hurts to grow up…and we’re still fighting it.

It’s not about me, again, this fight is not my fight, it’s not the fight of the government ; it’s the fight of the country, of the Syrian people.

Life’s full of lots of dream-stealers always telling you you need to do something more sensible. I think it doesn’t matter what your dream is, just fight the dream-stealers and hold onto it.