War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

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.

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.

It is easy to be just when our own inclinations do not oppose it.

America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.

Love is an active construction, and choice, not just an encounter that happens by chance.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.

-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

A couple of things for the not-so-diminutive man: avoid any prints that are large scale, because you will look like the print is wearing you, as opposed to you wearing the print.

No matter whether you are a physician, a teacher, or a clergyman, if you can give increase of life to others and make them sensible of that fact, they will be attracted to you, and you will get rich.

We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy.

The first hundred years are the hardest.