“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.”

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.

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

I’ve got cheekier with age. You can get away with murder when you’re 71 years old. People just think I’m a silly old fool.

If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament – disarmament follows peace.

I had a good run here, fifteen years. That’s a great run. I’m not saying that I’m done in center field – if I could play there forever, I would. But I know that’s not reality, so I’m happy.

The Revelation was my master’s project, and after I finished it, I thought I’d send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer.

William Graebner’s brilliant analysis of America’s struggles over the meaning of Patty Hearst gives us not only new perspectives on the 1970s.

When I was young, I had a big problem with warts. It started with one on the side of my little finger.

A few years back, when my style was “punk grandma”, I picked up an amazing pair of sandals – orthopaedic ones, with really thick soles. I’ve given them away to a friend now, because these days my look is more “1980s substitute teacher gone wild.”

If you’re going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won’t be interesting to the reader.