“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.”

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.

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.

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.

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

I want to put my soul into the music and still be who I am when it comes to an actual conversation.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

Two people in a conversation amount to four people talking. The four are what one person says, what he really wanted to say, what his listener heard, and what he thought he heard.

I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, ‘Kid, don’t make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you’re like David Frost. Make it a conversation.’

Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation.