Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.