"Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications."

"It is not too late for this to occur, but we're running out of time, with much work remaining to be done, and with no choice but to get it done. The consequences of failure grow with each passing week."

"Five decades after Sputnik, such apocalyptic dangers are still present, but from Americans in my generation the most articulated fears have to do with running out of money before breath. The USA is certainly no place to be old, sick, and low on funds. Huge medical bills and hazards of second-class care loom ahead. For people whose childhoods fell between victory over Japan and evacuation from Saigon, the twenty-first century has brought the time-honored and perfectly understandable quest to avoid dying before necessary -- and to avoid living final years or seeing loved ones living final years in misery. Under such circumstances, self obsession may seem unavoidable."

"Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

-- George Orwell, 1946

"...a challenge for Arab Americans to get organized and respond to the opportunities made available to them by a political process that rewards those who participate."

"The incredulity and numbing, the frequent bobbing-and-weaving of our own consciousness, the hollow comforts of passivity, insulate us from hard truths and harsher realities than we might ever have expected to need to confront -- about our country and about ourselves."

"Purporting to be Giuliani's foreign policy manifesto, "Toward a Realistic Peace" is, in fact, nothing more than unreconstructed neo-conservatism. In it, Giuliani presents the world painted in stark scenes of black and white, of good and evil engaged in mortal combat. This is Rudy's world, a "dangerous place" where "we cannot afford to indulge any illusions about the enemies we face." It is a world where conflict is inevitable and necessary, and where the fight must be taken to the enemy, and where we must be unrelenting and decisive."

"The news media claim to be providing context. But whose? Overall, the context of Uncle Sam in the more perverse and narcissistic aspects of his policy personality. The hypocrisies of claims about moral precepts and universal principles go beyond the mere insistence that some others “do as we say, not as we do.” What gets said, repeated and forgotten sets up kaleidoscope patterns that can be adjusted to serve the self-centered mega-institutions reliably fixated on maintaining their own dominance."