It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.

If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.