A genuine approach to budget cutting - knowing exactly what you're cutting and why, and with what real-life consequences - is beyond my competence, and probably beyond the competence of any politician in America.

It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.

One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

The way Donald Trump talks about the problems of black Americans as a kind of separate group who are not part of his audience but he's kind of reaching over his audience or behind his audience to black Americans, saying what have you got to lose? As in you might as well join me because the Democrats haven't done anything for you. But joining me means joining this group that already supports me.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we simply close the door and say you are beyond redemption.