"I don't know what happens to you after you die. I'm not banking on there being, like, a heaven."

"If Republicans eliminate Medicare, America will become a country in which you can never retire - and once you physically can no longer work, you are desperately poor until you die."

"Part of the middle class promise is that, after a lifetime of hard work, you'll be able to retire and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Medicare was established to secure that promise."

"My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure."

"If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years."

"I've never understood why we would want to deny all the joys - and the challenges - of marriage to anyone. Which is why I think any loving, committed couple - gay or straight - should be able to get married."

"I'm part of the mushball middle. I consider 'confused' the majority position because, thankfully, most people would rather be uncertain some of the time than 100% positive all the time - even when they're wrong."

"My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life."

"I once asked the most fabulous couple I know, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, how they kept things fresh despite having been married for almost seven months. 'It's a job, Al,' Guy told me. 'We work at it every day.'"

"If you hear, day after day, liberals are rooting against armed forces, that is eventually going to have an effect on soldiers and troops who are actually going to believe that and it's wrong. It's just wrong."

"The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good."

"Well, I think that there's a value to comedy in and of itself."

"We need to be pro-science; we have to go back to science."

"I think the Internet has developed at this incredibly rapid pace because of net neutrality, because of the free nature of it, because a YouTube can start the way YouTube started."

"If someone hacks your password, you can change it - as many times as you want. You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret."

"Apple has long been a leading innovator of mobile technology; I myself own an iPhone."

"The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace."

"I do personal attacks only on people who specialize in personal attacks."

"No one is more sensitive to the issue of overeating than the creator of Stuart Smalley."

"It's the Power of the Almighty, the Splendor of Nature, and then you."

"My daughter became a teacher right out of college."

"Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a 'living' document."

"During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian."

"Antitrust law isn't about protecting competing businesses from each other, it's about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public."

"Teen pregnancy went way down in the '90s, and 75 percent of it was because of increased use of contraception."

"You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret."

"To make the argument that the media has a left- or right-wing, or a liberal or a conservative bias, is like asking if the problem with Al-Qaeda is do they use too much oil in their hummus."

"Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you're under pressure."

"But in the right-wing media, they do have a right-wing bias. And they also have an agenda. So their agenda is: we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause."

"As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate."

"Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. 'That worked for everyone else,' God said."

"I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die."

"The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life."

"To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It's - I think they might use too much oil in their hummus - but it's the wrong question."

"There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'"

"Armed with nothing more than a Facebook user's phone number and home address, anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user's date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income."

"You have to love your country like an adult loves somebody, not like a child loves its mommy. And right-wing Republicans tend to love America like a child loves its mommy, where everything Mommy does is okay. But adult love means you're not in denial, and you want the loved one to be the best they can be."

"I also focus on Bush and his administration - who do a lot of lying - and how a right-wing media has allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff that, in a different media environment, they probably wouldn't be able to get away with."

"And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it."

"Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks."

"The right wing has had a radio apparatus for years and years, so they've had minor leagues - they've had local rightwing guys who've become national rightwing guys, and who build slowly, and that's how it goes. We haven't had that. It isn't like we have a farm team."

"Yeah, but you need an experienced radio veteran who is a liberal advocate. And there just hadn't been any radio that did that. And so they weren't trained - they had developed all these bad habits of being objective and balanced and stuff like that."

"The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I'm looking at a run for Senate in 2008, but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest."

"The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge."

"I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted."

"My spiritual life is... sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I don't. When I do have access to it, it's usually a sense of my understanding what the best course of action or the best thing for me to do. By best, I mean when I have a real sense of doing the right thing and doing good for people and the connected universe of everybody."

"When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online."

"Call-time has renewed my faith in the need for public financing of elections. 'Call-time' is where I as the candidate, sit in a room with my 'call-time manager,' and a phone. Then I call people and ask them for money. For hours. Apparently, I'm really good at it."

"Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down."

"Demagoguery sells. And therefore radio stations will put it on. But that doesn't mean that you can't do something else and also make it sell. You know, when I look at an Ann Coulter or I look at a Rush or I look at a Sean Hannity, I think to myself, 'What kind of self-image do you have?'"