“I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.”

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.

If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined … .

I’m angry at what’s happening to America and angry with myself that I can’t do more. I would be miserable if I couldn’t bear witness.

America’s corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they’re privatizing democracy. All the benefits – the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

This “degenerate and unlovely age,” as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.

I can’t speak for a war that I believe is immoral.

We don’t care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.

There’s hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don’t talk about what democracy means – what it bestows on us.

A people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn’t.

I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

Jerry Weintraub, the producer, might be a pain in the ass, but he really knows how to treat his actors.

And I was even beginning to think home might be with you.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

Positive emotions are not trivial luxuries, but instead might be critical necessities for optimal functioning.

I’m excited to see where the Illuminati and whatever else might happen, how that works, and where it ends up.

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

I ran through the manuscript in the space of a day, much as one might pick compulsively at a box of chocolates. It was simply too provocative to put down. Has the potential of being highly influential inside the field and among an informed public.

Anything I think isn’t working or might not work, I don’t even put it in the director’s cut. And usually it’s the studio suggesting I put stuff back in, as opposed to studios saying, “You got to lose 40 minutes,” they are always saying, “You’ve got to gain five minutes.”