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

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.

We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.

It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.

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.

You learn nothing about someone by the way they win the fight, you learn everything about the way they lose and keep coming back.

The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.

We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for.

I think I’m aware of what goes on in my mind more than some guys, and for that reason I fight more battles.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

We hadn’t lost morale. But when you fight for four quarters, it’s tough to always bounce back. The offense kept us in the game the last two weeks and to get out with a win feels really good.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that’s the right song to not fight the lyric.

Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight.