Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

I'm not a suit and tie kind of guy. I wear a suit once a year, for the Hall of Fame, or if I have to go to a funeral or something. It's just not me.

One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.

You might not think it now, but if you're one of God's children, you're going to figure it out by the end of your life God is good.

I think to be a good songwriter, you have to be able to play an instrument.

Friends are proved by adversity.

I don't really have a focus, I just make music.