"Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people."

"When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest."

"I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies."

"What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does."

"The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone."

"As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher."

"For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington."

"America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up."

"We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings."

"This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons."

"Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life."

"War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination."

"Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism."

"Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't."

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous."

"Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of."

"Democracy belongs to those who exercise it."

"I own and operate a ferocious ego."

"There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought."