What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart...the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.

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

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.

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.