“History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?”

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy’s show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

I can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country. This is not a personal matter. We are not people driven by a wish to be in the government since it is for us the least attractive work, even though we are politicians.

Griefs assured are felt before they come.

I assure you, an educated fool is more foolish than an uneducated one.

Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.

But hereof be assured, that all is not lawful nor just that is statute by civil laws; neither yet is everything sin before God, which ungodly persons allege to be treason.

Assurance is not to be obtained so much by self-examination as by action.

But assuredly Fortune rules in all things; she raised to eminence or buries in oblivion everything from caprice rather than from well-regulated principle.

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.