The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.

We've become the most eavesdropped, monitored, spied on, photographed population in human history, dwarfing anything that was done by the Stasi state and East Germany. And that's all been - you know, these are all the sacrifices that we supposedly have to make to make ourselves safe.

The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth.

We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success," defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.