“Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.”
“Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.”
“People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.”
“If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.”
“Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.”
“There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.”
“In all likelihood, the only thing extraordinary about Tiger Woods was his golf: he had extraordinary coordination and extraordinary discipline - on the course, at any rate. That discipline was the source of his power.”
“In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.”
“Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.”
“'Sesame Street' was a pioneering educational T.V. show, intended to help underprivileged children. But even those of us middle-class kids spoilt for pedagogical choice couldn't get enough of it.”