A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

Bill Clinton was a brilliant politician. If President Obama was a brilliant politician he would have come out before the election and said 'Hey we're gonna cut taxes, grow the economy, what I'm doing's not working, and we're gonna change course' like Clinton did.

I did not seek to sell U.S. secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

One of the greatest falsehoods of American politics over the past several decades is that the Republican party is the party of fiscal responsibility.

What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.