The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility.

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does.