When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House - as Brutus loved Caesar.

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.

There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.