The money that is spent in elections is absolutely unconscionable - even if it's private money. It's true that one's not corrupted by the expenditure of one's own money, but to some extent the system is. We cannot have a system in which the only people you can count on for a vote that doesn't look as though it might be a vote for a special-interest group are people with enormous fortunes.

Economics is not a science, in the sense that a policy can be repeatedly applied under similar conditions and will repeatedly produce similar results.

The curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be -- and that's so tempting.

There is hardly a facet of life that is now free of some sort of federal action.

In our times, significantly, the three outstanding voices against violence have been silenced by murder - Mahatma Gandhi in India, Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and Dr. Martin Luther King, here at home.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.