“For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths – half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does.

In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That’s why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.

In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror” – exactly what, pray tell, is that?

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us.

Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats – the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms – while the field hands are left with the scraps.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.

Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions – the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who’d rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.

Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there’s no use even trying.

Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.

Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.

Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

I find it so funny that for the first time in history, people have access to this great equalizer in the Internet, which grants everyone the same knowledge base.

If you’re going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you’re doing it for the first time.

I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.

Ed Sullivan brought me to TV first in 1952, then Garry Moore’s program gave me a lot of confidence and freedom.

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.