Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Noteworthy:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Decius:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Jules Dupuit:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.