Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

Expressing truth is hard work.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

Your deepest valleys lead you to your highest mountaintops.

Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.

Don't tell a lie to be loved, speak the truth to be hated.

We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person's sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge.

I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part.

Be nice to everyone and tell jokes.

I don't think there's any harm at all in allowing a kid to fantasize. In fact, I think to stop people from fantasizing is a very destructive thing indeed.

And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone.

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.