Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Sometimes you have to understand that you push ahead, there's going to be a lot of flak, there's going to be a lot of dogs barking, but the wagon train moves ahead.

The truth is that you - people are doing scientific research with fetal tissue and it's not as if - no, this is brand-new news. This is something funded by.

For me, the key is I always have to be the same person.If someone was to hear me say something on Fox and hear me say something different on NPR, they would say, 'The guy is a hypocrite.'

When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language.

Hikes in the debt ceiling - without any political demands from the opposition party - had been routine until President Obama took office.

My wife and I, Delice and I, are empty nesters.

There's a difference between using the word to insult somebody and using it to start a journalistic conversation.

I've always thought the Right-wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant ,and now I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, it's representing the Left.

The Republicans want to turn Medicare into a voucher plan that will end guaranteed coverage of medical bills for the elderly.

Bling" is not an indication of riches. It is a product of value-based spending, to enrich the pockets of those outside of ones sphere of influence...the haves' bleeding the have-nots'.

I was there laughing and joking with everyone else, but it’s like there was some part of mestanding back, watching, thinking, “Is this as good as it gets?

If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?

How we look - though it is superficial and immutable - has a huge impact on our lives.

I was born in 1968, just eighteen months after my sister Chrisse and just one year after Dad passed the bar exam.

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.

Coffee: we can get it anywhere, and get as loaded as we like on it, until such teeth-chattering, eye-bulging, nonsense-gibbering time as we may be classified unable to operate heavy machinery.

Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it.

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.