The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.

The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; its broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

There's something totally crazy about this.

Don't let what you fear stop you from pursuing it. For the most part, what you fear doesn't even know that you are afraid of it.

I like to do chill things on dates. I think it would be fun to go to the zoo. I know it's really weird and random, but I love animals. It'd be like a day of doing silly things, while enjoying nature.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

There's a sense of productivity which cripples us terribly. We either have to be doing something worthwile or not. We are back to our little binary male-female code.

Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop.

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed

I don't think we live in those times when great art comes out of great adversity.

I think that's what keeps you grounded - having your own life that's not directed by your job.

Forgiveness is one of the many horrible side effects of loving someone.