We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

When I was in college in the late 80s-early 90s, there was a sense that history was on a straight path toward democracy everywhere. Well, that's not true. It was also not true that there's a single era of oligarchy, because we showed we could do something about it.

Indonesia is the world's third-largest democracy. And we also have the world's largest Muslim population. This demonstrates that democracy and Islam are not incompatible. Terrorism is not associated with any religion.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.