Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
Even writers need relief from words.
Radio is the playground of coincidence.
My audience is going to die before I do.
Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.
What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
My lips are chapped from the winds of change.
Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.
Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.
Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.
I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.
I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.
The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.
My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.
I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.
No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.
American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.
In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?
The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.
One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.
Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?
You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.
Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try.
The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top
If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.
I still believe in public radio's potential. Because it's the one mass medium that's still crafted almost entirely by true believers.
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.
I'm not really the scented envelope kid of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffy-lite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.
History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.
We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.
I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.
I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old.
That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War - when I really think about them, they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.