No matter what happens in a child's home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'

False hope is worse than despair.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

Everything precious comes out of solitude.

We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

One nanny said, "Feed a cold"; she was a neo-Keynesian. Another nanny said, "Starve a cold"; she was a monetarist.

I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

Coyote never loses. Because I change the rules of the games my enemies play. What are the rules of your game?

There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.

People from the past always seem to have much more time to create beautiful, intricate, delicate things that often reach the future in a kind of curled-up, capsized state.