“After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.”

I dont see we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government.

I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can’t put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn’t be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

I’m in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It’s fun.

But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people’s holding beliefs other than their own?

It’s always better to be wise than to be smart.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.

So every day till the end of this campaign, Ill answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have a question on religion, please, go to church.

That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.

Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for ‘Scientific American Frontiers.’

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me.

I’m very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they’re making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repainting.

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.

I always saw myself as an old man living in the mountains playing a guitar, but I didn’t really turn that into a desire to be a professional musician or a singer or a rock star or anything like that.

If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.

Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.

To do something that you feel in your heart that’s great, you need to make a lot of mistakes. Anything that’s successful is a series of mistakes.

I don’t have anything to prove.

I want to like my music before you like it. I don’t want to sell anything that I don’t really like.