Quotes

There's a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It's really gone too far. I don't know an easy way to turn it back.

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing.

When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

Escapism makes a lot of intuitive sense - whisk people away from their cares with stories of a better life.

In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society - like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.

As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of 'Mad Men' are good company.

A federal Voters' Bill of Rights could press the states to put non-partisan managers in charge of elections.

In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' it is played for laughs.

When the gun lobby fights gun-control legislation, its logic is clear: it does not like laws that prevent people from owning or using guns.

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Ballot formats should be standardized nationally rather than left to the often bad judgment of local officials.

The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.

If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

People's genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's.

One way to reduce the need for layoffs would be to cut back on hours, spreading the available work among more employees.

As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.

Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.

There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.