“Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.”

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

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.

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.

The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man’s place in the Islamic society.

[President Obama] made so many promises. We thought that he was going to be — I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime — but the next messiah.

Every citizen of this country should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth, their vote has a much weight as that of any CEO, any member of Congress, or any President.

I truly believe that before I retire from public office, I’ll be voting for a woman for president.

We are not voting for health care if we do not resolve this language on public funding for abortion – no public funding for abortion.

I am sure that every one of my colleagues “Democrat, Republican, and Independent” agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, every one is equal.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.

We do not believe in government through the voting booth.