The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.

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.

Accept loyalty gratefully, and accept betrayal with a smile, knowing that it teaches you life lessons.

Who am I to put boundaries on God’s forgiveness? If God had put boundaries on His grace and mercy to me, when would enough have been enough?

If there are any tears shed in heaven, it will be because we prayed so little.

A dog desires affection more than its dinner. Well - almost.

Lawyers are the jackals of commerce.

An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

I remember all too well the premiere of Ecstasy when I watched my bare bottom bounce across the screen and my mother and father sat there in shock.

I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.

Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, - the bare existence of such a power, - is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.