Young people refuse to be defined exclusively as consumers rather than as workers, and they reject the notion that the only interests that matter are monetary.

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.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

What we want for others doesn't work unless they want it for themselves.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

Every bit of our lives revolves around how we get from one place to another and how long it's going to take to get there and what time of day you have to leave to do it.

Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind.

I don't really cook much. I'm more of a baker. My favorite things to bake that everybody loves, and I can only keep in the house for about ten minutes, are 7-Up cake and Pineapple Upside-Down cake.

You can use principles of the free market to drive social change.

Russia ought to get Iran to back out of the proxy wars they are involved in.

All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.