“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.”

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 news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

I didn’t have a very religious family.

To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

Software never was perfect and won’t get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality.

Don’t expect your spouse to be perfect. He/she is only the dunya version of themselves. Their ‘perfect’ version is saved for jennah.

There’s sort of a theory that’s going around in the China-watching community about a perfect storm coming up with the 2008 Olympics, a U.S. election and a Taiwanese election, some sort of mutually reinforcing explosion and crisis.

Beauty isn’t about looking perfect. It’s about celebrating your individuality.

[On his 83rd birthday] Physical condition or advancing of age are not obstacles to a perfect life. God does not look at external things but at the soul.

Everything is as it should be. God’s design is perfect.

I have the perfect simplified tax form for government. Why don’t they just print our money with a return address on it?

Female artists are the perfect example of a creator: They know how to make life and art with their bodies. Life comes from their bodies, so on a very basic level, they have more to write about.