I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.

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.

Leadership gives more than it can receive.

Okay... I get that... but why I!?

I had these recipes that say do this, do that. Who MAKES these rules?

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

Then, when people saw you strolling around at high noon holding your rosary beads, they’d think, ‘Well, that can’t be a vampire.

There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

It is rash to condemn where you are ignorant.

That which is not yet known comes out of that which is not yet here.

Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value.