Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.

Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.

The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.

Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.

Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.

Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.

The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.

Love can never be fully explained.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.

Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There's nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D'Amato, they'll take anybody.

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.

I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.

The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

Satire doesn't effect change.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.

Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent!

I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.

Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.

I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'

I believe in God. God created the world.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.