Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

I have found over the years that the most important way of getting people to relax is self-deprecating humor.

If you give up on politics, you're giving up on democracy. And if you give up on democracy, you're basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society, take it all. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we give up. Then we are 100 percent plutocracy.

The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn't technology or globalization. It's the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.

In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.