“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”

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.

Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.

Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.

Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House – as Brutus loved Caesar.

Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one

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.

Yet 91 percent think it’s “not likely” that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done.

The most encouraging sign is that 71 percent of the public believe the system is profoundly corrupted by the power of money. Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s “important” that we reduce the influence of money.

It is but another of the proofs which are heaping up in American industry to-day that whatever is good for men and women – contributes to their health, happiness, development – is good for business.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet’s religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil … From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. …

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

Perfect love will never want the preeminence in everything, it will never want to take the place of another, it will always be willing to take the back seat.