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.

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.

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

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.

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

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

She was damaged because she had no one, and he was damaged because neither did he.

This worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality, always struck me as like being a revival of the ancient cults, in which animals were gods or the gods bore the heads of animals.

It was heartbreaking . . . I think it was disappointing because I had such an identity in being 'Mrs. Parker', and being a wife, and so when that's taken away from you, you [think], 'Who am I?

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

If Kevin James or Paul Giamatti drop weight, I'm done. I don't want to be the last pudge out there.

Music is the expression of the will of nature while all other arts are expressions of the idea of nature.

Y'know, every relationship is different. There are good marriages, bad marriages, connected partners, unconnected partners.

I love talking to all the kids, and have enjoyed the enthusiasm and response from their teachers as well.

A negative is never finished.