Humor itself is a great disinfectant. It enables people to listen.

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality fo result. Its equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.

We're the richest economy in the history of the world. For the majority of Americans not to get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy, there's something fundamentally wrong.

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

It is a myth that higher taxes lead to less demand and slower growth. In the first three decades after World War II, US top tax rates on the wealthy were never below 70 percent.

The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.

An extreme fearfulness moves through all your body, and your mind is troubled more.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Learn by reading, listening, observing, imitating, and emulating.

So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.

we sulked and, in the finest tradition of bored soldiers, sat around throwing stones at each other.

We [people] need to stop lumping folks together and start living together. Otherwise, we're going to kill each other off because you don't believe what I believe. That's crazy.

Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs.

All of us need better skills in listening, conversing, respecting one another's uniqueness, because these are essential for strong relationships.

I always feel vulnerable talking about the poetry aspect of my career because it's little diary entries that I need to sometimes close read, and to reveal that much, it's a bit nerve-racking.

He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.