We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs....We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.

The problem with party politics is that people get involved every two or four years and that is it. In the meantime, the legislature and Minnesota politics are on a separate track.

As free citizens in a political democracy, we have a responsibility to be interested and involved in the affairs of the human community, be it at the local or the global level.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.

There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.

We can and must move U.S. politics forward by means of committed participation.