A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.

You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.

Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.

Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world.

We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.

Centrism is bogus.

The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.

You can't create a political movement out of pabulum.

The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.

Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.

America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.

America's real business leaders understand unless or until the middle class regains its footing and its faith, capitalism remains vulnerable.

As digital equipment replaces the jobs of routine workers and lower-level professionals, technicians are needed to install, monitor, repair, test, and upgrade all the equipment.

As income from work has become more concentrated in America, the super rich have invested in businesses, real estate, art, and other assets. The income from these assets is now concentrating even faster than income from work.

As long as the big banks are allowed to remain big, their political leverage over Washington will remain big. And as long as their political leverage remains big, the taxpayer and economic tab for the next mess they create will be big.

As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.

As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.

Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.

Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.

Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

Corporations aren't people. They have no brains, no consciences, no capacity for intent or guilt.

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

Even if there's no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there's no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.

Evidence suggests jobs are crucial not only to economic well-being but also to self-esteem.

Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

I'm all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren't really charities as most people understand the term.

I'm not one of those who thinks the only way to fix what's wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.

In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.