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While the median pay for top corporate executives has quadrupled since the 1970s, the pay of non-supervisory workers has declined [in 2011] by more than 10 percent. — Robert Scheer

America never was America to me. — Langston Hughes

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us." — Bill Moyers

There is a hard law. . . . When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive. — Alan Patton

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies. — Nelson Mandela

Money is the liquor of politics. Our politicians are drunk from it. Without the shock of an intervention, you can’t expect them to recover. What form that intervention takes, I can’t predict. . . Maybe we’ll find out. Meanwhile, don’t give your heart to any candidate who won’t swear off the booze. — Bill Moyers

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. — Lord Alfred Tennyson

When heroes die, it is human nature to wrap their lives in metal, marble and granite. We do this that we might remember them, but there is in the remembering also a kind of reduction. The rough and jagged lines of a life lived at the forefront, lived in controversy, conflict and trial, become something smooth and safe enough for children. . . . His life has become a bedtime story. In our day, poor people find themselves denigrated and demeaned in ways that shock conscience. Former South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer once likened them to stray animals one feeds at the back door. Fox News pundit John Stossel sees them as the enemy in a battle between “the makers and the takers.” Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning compares them to scavenging "raccoons." Ann Coulter says welfare creates ‘irresponsible animals." — Leonard Pitts

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them. 'Bleeding the U.S.,' in his words." — Eric Margolis

To the chagrin of many friends, Will [Campbell] insisted that since “we’re all bastards but God loves us anyway,” there was grace even for racists. It is grace found, not in “acquittal by law” but “acquittal by resurrection,” that “takes us into a freedom where it would never occur to us to kill somebody.” — Bill Leonard