Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

Expressing truth is hard work.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

Or, maybe what really mattered was that game of Crazy 8s.

In big houses in which things are done properly there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Putting a little time aside for clean fun and good humor is very necessary to relieve the tensions of our time.

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

It is hard to give up what you know for what you don’t know.

I want to be left alone.

The sun is set; and in his latest beams Yon little cloud of ashen gray and gold, Slowly upon the amber air unrolled, The falling mantle of the Prophet seems.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.