I never thought when I was a kid that I would become an adult. I never thought of myself as having any sort of distant horizon. I have sort of leapt without a master plan.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media... it doesn't make sense.

It is hard to know what Sarah Palin means in Republican politics anymore.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.

[Dan Fried] served six presidents over a 40-year career dating back to the [Jimmy] Carter administration.

The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up.