What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.