People used to trade their guitars to get new ones; I never traded anything.

I like 'Salty Dog' by Procol Harum.

Cheap Trick have always prided ourselves on being groundbreaking.

In 1977, I had Paul Rivera hotrod six Fender Deluxes for me. At that time, a lot of studio guys in L.A. were using those - not so much live guys but studio guys. They had terrific tone and great technique, and I was like, 'Well, I like having terrific tone even though I don't have any technique.'

Some people design buildings and aircraft carriers and cars - and I designed picks.

Hendrix was a different kind of guitar player. It was like, 'Holy cow, this guy can sing, he can play all this weird stuff... what is this?' It was a new kind of music.

I took one guitar lesson, and they wanted me to play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore,' and that was the last guitar lesson that I ever took, so I taught myself what I wanted to know.

I was the Richard Gere non-lookalike in Illinois.

I never wanted to be Keith Richards or Jimmy Page.

I love guitars, and guitars love me, but sometimes they need new homes where they can live to rock another day.

I'm kind of a goony guy, a dweeb or a geek.

The way I look at it, I'm a songwriter that just happens to play guitar.

If you don't have a great chorus, write a good bridge first. I often do that and find I write good bridges.

Living someplace like L.A. seemed awful to me.

I just wanted to write about stuff that was happening in real life, and that's not just love songs about your girlfriend.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969.

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'

For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation.

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.

In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

Here's an irony of the history of conservatism's relationship with business and business's relationship with conservatism: 'Wall Street' used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties' greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital).

The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.'

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer.

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?

The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right - until conservatives stole it from them - they weaken progressivism.

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.

I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person aspires to be the most powerful person in the world? The answer is someone with an internal drive that is so dynamic and so determined.

As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal.

Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President').

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.