As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

While developing a healthy self-esteem is a lifetime learning process, you can take daily steps to enjoy a confident sense of well-being beginning tody.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Love is an eternal shining star.

One misstep was all it took, and it all came crashing down. And they were right there waiting for it—eager and ready to bury me in the wreckage.

The protestant martyrs and their monuments testify to the fact that they died, not on account of ecclesial differences, but because the issue was the way of salvation.

It is a good thing to be rich and strong, but it is a better thing to be loved.

The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

I tend to read things that are a little more on the nourishing side. But if I don't enjoy something, I'll put it down.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

It seems to me that the idea traditionally defended of endeavoring to maintain existing ethnic balances simply doesn't work any more.