I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make sense of them. I'm more worried that I'm going to die before I've had time.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral society - not a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.