“A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.”

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

I’m not all that enthralled by show business, and I’m not that much of a highbrow.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

Pain is Pain. Broken is Broken. FEAR is the Biggest Disability of all. And will PARALYZE you More Than Being in a Wheelchair.

Fear is a bigger disability than having no arms and no legs.

The activity you’re most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity.

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don’t die of diarrhea anymore, but it’s a huge problem in the developing world.

I was a bigger-than-life persona before I was anyone in my own mind.

The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.

Big things are built one brick at a time. Victories are achieved one choice at a time. A life well lived is chosen one day at a time.

Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one’s monopoly