“We’re playing our instruments probably more so than most people that I see play their instruments.”

It’s no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

You know what’s the rage this year? …Hats.

There’s 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.

David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital.

The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.

If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined … .

I’m angry at what’s happening to America and angry with myself that I can’t do more. I would be miserable if I couldn’t bear witness.

America’s corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they’re privatizing democracy. All the benefits – the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

The audience is like my instrument. It’s not just me up there, it’s collaborative.

Attack your instruments. Don’t let them attack you.

You can be enticed by food, wooed by food, sex, money, or instruments.

I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.