As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

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.

It's about "Moments, " not Milestones.

We became God’s carriers because of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Kindness is stronger than iron bars.

It seems to me a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and nature have made free.

My mom always said I was the peacemaker in the family. My older brother, Eric, was the leader, the creative one. I was just his puppet.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

As long as you are carrying a secret, as long as you are trying to ease your conscience by telling God how sorry you are, you are setting yourself up to repeat the past.

The moderns do not realize modernity.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof.