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

You have to keep a sense of humor about yourself, more than anything else. You've got to take the issues very seriously, but you can't take yourself too seriously. And Washington is a city in which everybody takes themselves extraordinarily seriously.

We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

Averages don't always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet.

We're the richest economy in the history of the world. For the majority of Americans not to get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy, there's something fundamentally wrong.

We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.

We need to expand Social Security to prevent the looming retirement crisis, and we can do it simply by asking billionaires to pay their fair share.