There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

There is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.

It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

You know, what genuinely makes me uneasy with the way things are going are not - is not really that Trump is going to do everything he said he was going to do, it`s that he has no idea of his job as president. Plus, the people who have been up close and realized that he has no idea how to do this job are leaking like sieves.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

The man is the Piltdown Man of modern politics.

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

I think, over the last couple of years, the written word has made a comeback on the Internet. For example, I'm seeing more long-form narrative experiments there. The overall noise level, however, continues to increase. Do we really need TV screens to watch when we pump gas? Really?

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.