The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

Personally, I think Mitt Romney would be a great secretary of state.

Donald Trump is so egregious in the way he talks about women, the way he allegedly treated women.

It's important for presidents to emotionally connect, with the country in times of crisis, but also with people in Washington. If you can't emotionally connect - and [Barack] Obama is not the greatest, but he can at least do it - then people won't be with you when the times are hard.

No matter where you are on politics, I think it is wonderful to see candidates funding campaigns not by talking to a very small number of very rich people, but by reaching out to a very large number of citizens.

When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"