“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.”

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.

This “degenerate and unlovely age,” as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.

I can’t speak for a war that I believe is immoral.

We don’t care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.

There’s hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don’t talk about what democracy means – what it bestows on us.

A people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn’t.

I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit.

The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it’s taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.

I can’t marry myself to one idea or one form of doing politics or one form of understanding politics.

Many of the vicious criminals held there have been caught on the battlefield fighting against American troops and shutting down Guantanamo Bay would just require the military to move them elsewhere.

Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands

I’m a very typical yoga-practicing musician; I do it when I can. I’m not hardcore about it. A lot of my lyrics talk about celebrating life and working through pain. I think that’s what yoga’s about, getting rid of, moving energy and letting it flow through you.

If someone walks away from me, I just let them walk, and I move on to the next person.

If you listen to really deep ambient records that don’t move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.

You’ve got to pay attention to what you’re attracted to because as you hold images of what you want, you’re gonna be attracted to things that are going to be attracted to you, but it literally moves into physical reality with and through you and it does that by law.

Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t ever do anything that is going to hurt her husband. She tries things out on him. She gets permission to do things.