“Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.”

“Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.”

“Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.”

“To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.”

“Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.”

“Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.”

“Expressing truth is hard work.”

“If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.”

“Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.”

“Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.”

“Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.”