We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .

Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.

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.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

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

I really do put it on Bill Clinton's presidency as the time when the Democrats became the party of the college degree as the key to success in life.