Quotes from E.J. Dionne Jr.

if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. Do you remember, Stevenson said, that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

Religious people should always be wary of the ways in which political power is wielded and skeptical of how economic privileges are distributed. They should also be mindful of how their own traditions have been used for narrow political purposes, and how some religious figures have manipulated the faith to aggrandize their own power. The doctrine of original sin and the idea of a fallen side of human nature apply to people who are religious no less than those who are not.

At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.

The ideas in each—from profit-sharing with employees to new approaches to job training, from reform of the financial system to promote long-term time horizons on investment to more progressive taxes and large-scale infrastructure investment—would help create a more just economy.

Let's be honest about journalists: We find a lot of ways of being wrong.

You have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a strategy. I'll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes. You see, change requires more than righteous anger.

spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Deregulation not only opened the way the crash of 2008.

cuts that that majorities of the voters