“I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.”

All of the religions – with the exception of Tibetan Buddhism, which doesn’t believe in a heaven – teach that heaven is a better place. At the end of the program, I say that heaven is a place where you are happy. All of the religions have that in common.

People sinking into self-pity and depression are dreary, but they can’t get out of it by themselves. So every now and then, just sit there and listen, and listen, and listen. You’re paying your membership dues in the human race.

I think most working relationships could benefit by excluding personal matters from the office chatter.

If it’s a woman, it’s caustic; if it’s a man, it’s authoritative.

The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.

politics … is the hottest, most dangerous subject in the land. It’s not only a conversation-wrecker, it’s a friendship-wrecker, a family-wrecker, a job-wrecker, a future-wrecker.

I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s. I wasn’t a beauty.

A man cannot be comfortable [or cannot be made comfortable] without his own approval.

Being a parent is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy

[President Obama] made so many promises. We thought that he was going to be — I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime — but the next messiah.

The feeling is that Fidel Castro’s much bigger than he actually is.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code – even though it was a great yawn – also showed people’s interest in religion.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

The aging process seems to strike first at the mechanism which warns that we have been talking too much and the listener is growing restless. The signal isn’t perfect at any age – drink, for instance, throws it right out of kilter – but it is almost non-existent in old people.