Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

Television preachers extract money from the poor to live in a style and to indulge in shameful acts which equal or outdo the worst of the Renaissance Popes.

We are afraid to face the hard questions. We are willing to tackle drugs, crime, and public education only if it doesn't cost us any new taxes.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.