A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

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.

In the early 1970s, Milton Friedman argued that corporations should not be socially responsible because they had no mandate to be; they existed to make money, not to be charitable institutions. But in the economy of the 21st century, corporations cannot be socially responsible, if social responsibility is understood to mean sacrificing profits for the sake of some perceived social good. That's because competition has become so much more intense.

I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.

I'm quite optimistic when it comes to the capacity of our people to have an honest discussion about what's really going on. What do you think John McCain's candidacy was about? And the early days of Bill Bradley's candidacy? People are hungry for a genuine, no-spin set of ideas and truths. They want their leaders to tell it like it is. There is a great demand for this. Politicians continually underestimate the ability of the American public to understand what's happening to them and what the real choices are.

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

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.