Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization...Without it, the imagination is but the echo of the self, trapped in a soundproof chamber, reverberating upon itself until it is spent in exhaustion or futility.