When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury.

a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.

We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.

The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.

...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.