Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.
Certain murderous ideas are in the air worldwide, and they are finding individuals in scattered places in different ways, and every attack spreads them further, plants an idea in a new head.
I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.
The idea of solving as huge and long-term a problem as inequality - which, for my money, is the biggest single problem we have here at home - just never gets serious concern from both sides.
Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.
It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.
I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.
The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
'Charlie Hebdo' had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too - but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism.
Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests.
I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.
Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting - the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took.
When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office, he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like 'Leadership' by Rudolph Giuliani. I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.
Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.
When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like "Leadership" by Rudolph Giuliani . I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.
To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
A genuine approach to budget cutting - knowing exactly what you're cutting and why, and with what real-life consequences - is beyond my competence, and probably beyond the competence of any politician in America.
I've been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.
When Donald Trump yells at his supporters to throw somebody out of the hall - and usually that somebody is brown or black or often is - that means he's galvanizing a kind of mob spirit, which is also a racial mob spirit.
Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump's incendiary campaign.
I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid.
If the presidential nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo.
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero - these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are - in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively - gangster heroes. That's who is worshipped: people who get away with it.
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that's sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of 'Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.'
What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.
Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just doesn't have the answer. It's simply a way to whip up emotion and then leave people more bitter than you found them.
Part of the mystique of blogs is their protean quality: They work both sides of the divide between politics and media, further blurring the already fuzzy distinctions between reporter, pundit, political operative, activist, and citizen.
The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.
The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available.
The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.
We all have a dark side but we keep it in its place because it's destructive. And Donald Trump has said, no, no, bring it out because that's the energy we need in order to reverse all these horrible things that have been happening in America.
Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.
For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.
Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.
People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.
Foreign policy exactly suits Obama's strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment.
No one pretends anymore that the Olympics are just about sports. It's routine to talk about what effect holding the Games in this or that capital will have on the host country's international reputation, how a nation's prestige can be raised by its medal count.
The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.
It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.
I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.
Hillary Clinton would say I'm going to fund a program that will find the local, you know, industrial or manufacturing jobs that are available and train you to do that job. And then you're going to get that job. And it's a much more of a nuts and bolts sort of policy vision.