States are not moral agents.

Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers' rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous. That's like a referendum in Greece. It is dangerous to allow that.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance.

A lot of the letters that are coming in - a lot of them are queries or comments - are one sentence long... These are from Twitter. And if you look at the nature of those one sentence letters, most of the time it's something that came to somebody's mind - somebody walking down the street had a thought and sent it out. If they thought about it for two minutes they would not have sent it.

Every wave of immigrants who came [to America] were treated pretty badly, but when they all finally became integrated, all of us became Anglo-Saxons.

I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.