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.

Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.

Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight. It will not have its intended effect until we feel desperately the need for a Savior.

When it comes to raising children, I believe in give and take. I give orders and they take 'em.

Poor people have been voting for Democrats for the last 50 years and they're still poor.

We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

Pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.

We need to build downtime into our lives, so that we can have solitude without feeling overcome with guilt.

In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.