WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Matt Damon and Diane Ravitch speaking at my alma mater, Cal-State Northridge.

Matt Damon

“I’m very honored to have the opportunity to introduce Diane tonight. She’s somebody that I have admired for a very long time. She’s an amazing person. She’s America’s foremost historian in the areas of education policy, she’s a champion of public education, she’s a courageous speaker and she’s a truth-teller.” -- Daily Sundial

Diane Ravitch

Do we have problems in American education? Of course we do! Our single biggest problem is that our policymakers have ignored the toxic effects of poverty and segregation. Our inner-city kids have low academic performance because they are poor, and worse, their schools are being stripped bare by budget cuts. -- Conversation with WaPo's Valerie Strauss

Tom Hayden

The logic of voter turnout data all but guarantees right-wing Republican congressional victories in 2014 and a sealing of the divide of America into two countries for the foreseeable future. -- The Rag Blog

Ta-Nehisi Coates

As I noted, the problem is not that I dwell too long and too angrily on America's systemic racism, but that America's systemic racism has tended to dwell too long and too angrily on me. -- The Atlantic

 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual. Everybody does." -- TPM, Scalia Has Friends He 'Very Much Suspects' Are Homosexual