If you give up on democracy, you might as well give up on everything.

The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.

I am not an economic determinist. If I were, I would throw up my hands; I just would not bother. I think it's wrong to be an economic determinist. I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're going to get a lousy education; if you're lower-middle class, the cards are going to be stacked against you, and you'll probably never get anywhere".

We can't have extraordinary dynamism, innovation, and change in the economy and expect to have predictability and stability in our personal lives. It's not as if there are these big, giant institutions existing between us and the economy. In fact, these institutions have become tissue-thin. There is no mediation anymore. We are the economy; the economy is us.

One thing I've learned from 35 years in the classroom is that people learn best when they are laughing, when they are emotionally hit, that it's both the brain and the heart.

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.

The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there's upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.