No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting. ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions.

If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.