“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, theres always a chance that the dancing bear will win.”

“For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never wash out the stain of servil...”

“Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from th...”

“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.”

“I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.”

“It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.”

“We are the same, you and I. Whether samurai or night-hawk, the Suruga Dainagon or member of the Toudouza, it makes no difference. My sword is the proof...."These words, wrung from the very depths o...”

“Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son int...”

“We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.”

“For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If...”

“It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, ...”

“As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with h...”