Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.