To protect our country's economic future and the health and well being of all Americans, we must find a way to rein in out-of-control costs, provide quality, affordable health care choices to all, and make outrageous insurance industry abuses a thing...
I wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White Ho...
I am concerned if 25 percent of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. I mean, it's obviously a lack of knowledge. But also, it's for the Muslims as well, you know, because a small numbers of Muslims have really painted a very negative ima...
Globalisation means many other countries are asserting themselves and trying to take over leadership. Please don't ask Americans to let others assume the leadership of human exploration. We can do wonderful science on the Moon, and wonderful commerci...
President Obama is determined that our foreign and national security policies not play into al-Qa'ida's strategy or its warped ideology. Al-Qa'ida seeks to terrorize us into retreating from the world stage. But President Obama has made it a priority ...
Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost i...
I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an America...
One of the worst and most disheartening data points that I came across when doing research for 'The Wealth Cure' was that African-Americans passed on the least amount of cross-generational wealth of any distinct group. We don't save, we don't take ou...
I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an au...
The presidency awed me, but presidents do not. Perhaps I have always expected too much of them, but I believe that when they reach the highest office in the land, they should live up to the greatest honor that can come to a person in American politic...
'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, incl...
'Lean on Pete' is the story of a boy and his horse, but it is never heart-warming - it ranges in tone from desperate to merely painful - and, while fascinating, it is never entertaining or redemptive. But if you want an unadorned portrait of American...
Media is so weird; everything is so accessible now. It used to be this thing where, if you did something on 'This American Life,' this predates me, but when David Sedaris did it, for example, it would just play, people who heard it heard it, and then...
Only one American has given his life for Iranian democracy. He was a young idealist from Nebraska named Howard Baskerville. In 1907, fresh out of Princeton, Baskerville went to Iran as a schoolteacher. He found himself in the midst of a revolution ag...
My accent has changed my whole life. When I was younger, it was very Nigerian, then when we went to England, it was very British. I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I ...
If I could distil the relevance of Bruce Springsteen's music to Australia it would be this: don't let what has happened to the American economy happen here. Don't let Australia become a down-under version of New Jersey, where the people and the commu...
I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we're not really a culture geared to anything as humble as 'learning.' But I was disappointed in how quickly everyone wanted to get back to normal. It was as if we watched terrorism on TV...
And I guess I'm a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to...
There is an image of me in France that is a long stretch from who I really am. I read about this girl who lives in grand hotels and has affairs with American actors - I don't recognise this girl at all. Sometimes it makes me depressed. Sometimes it m...
I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we've ever had because it is so materialistic and it's so full of lies. The whole advertising world is just, it's just intertwined with lies, appealing to the worst of the instincts we hav...
