When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.

I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.

In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness.

Today, the practice of medicine in an urban, technological society rarely provides either the time or the environment to encourage a doctor-patient relationship that promotes healing.

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.

In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life -- one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.

There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.

Although I was brought up in a culturally and religious conservative culture, as a Baptist I was taught that no one has the right to subpoena your conscience.

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

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.

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?

The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch's empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back.

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 things I really cared about -- poverty, the Great Society, civil rights -- were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral.

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

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

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

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly veneration of wealth are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.

Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.