“What has happened here [aftermath of 9/11] is not war in its traditional sense. This is clearly a crime against humanity.”

I don’t say they’re naive, I say they’re stupid. Stupid to an incredible degree to send young people out to kill other young people they don’t even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. That is the current system. I am naive? That’s insane.

People get discouraged. They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged.

Look what’s happened to the same-sex marriages. To tell somebody a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, and a man can marry a man, they would have said,

I prefer law to war under all circumstances.

If it’s naive to want peace instead of war, let ’em make sure they say I’m naive. Because I want peace instead of war.

“You’re crazy.” But it’s a reality today. So the world is changing. And you shouldn’t – you know – be despairing because it’s never happened before. Nothing new ever happened before.

And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.

Well, if it’s naive to want peace instead of war, let ’em make sure they say I’m naive. Because I want peace instead of war. If they tell me they want war instead of peace.

Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task.

War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.

I don’t think I’m an idealist. I’m a realist. And I see the progress. The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. You’re sitting here as a female.

There are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you’re doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.

Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.

Poetry is very crafted. You can’t have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.

We can learn from IBM’s successful history that you don’t have to have the best product to become number one.

In absolute terms, we may have to look at restricting the number of flights people take.

I like ’50s and ’60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.