In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

I've always been progressive on social issues: pro-choice, pro-gun control, and pro-gay rights - even when I was a Republican. The big difference is that I once believed the private sector would address America's social problems. But then I saw firsthand that this wasn't going to happen.

Those who have matured spiritually, now put service to others at the center of their quest and of their lives.

It's not just the over $8 billion that we would be saving in law enforcement; it's also the over $8 billion that we would be making by taxing marijuana... We are filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders - predominantly young, predominantly African American... It's a great beyond left and right issue. It has support across the political spectrum and also the support of the majority of the American people.

Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's about getting up one more time than we fall down.

Being a mother is the role I'm most proud of.