“The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section.”

The Titanic was built by professionals. The Ark was built by volunteers.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people – your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.

I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

I love talking to people, but what I really love is to feel you’re doing something instead of sitting home and twiddling your thumbs.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

I don’t like attacking.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

You may think the president is all-powerful, but he is not. He needs a lot of guidance from the Lord.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

I mean you can learn how to build a bullet or build a gun or build a bomb on the Internet.

And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse. I wish him well!

I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.

At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.

I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called ‘vices’, to be free of intruders, and to privacy.

If you don’t think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CD’s and burn them.

I hope the Icelandic government grants me political asylum.

Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

If I am a great man, then all great men are frauds.

We also have to engage – and I think this is important – in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

In every song I write, whether it’s a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.