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

They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!

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.

I think journalism can come from anywhere, and comedy can certainly come from anywhere.

Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done.

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.

In journalism, if there’s a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you’ve got a 4 p.m. deadline.

Each genre has its own process. I’m very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned.

And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life’s picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.