Even with the best of intentions, even when they're very smart and knowledgeable - as opposed to George W., who is neither - it doesn't seem to matter.

I've been with the paper for almost 30 years.

For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.

I have broken a lot of stories.

And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.

Even with the best of intentions, even when they're very smart and knowledgeable - as opposed to George W., who is neither - it doesn't seem to matter.

And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.

The decision came from the publisher. It certainly was cleared by Chicago. And then they come out with these fine sounding words about relation to readers and their obligation. It has nothing to do with that.

The publisher has told - you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.

What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.

I was able to do something that people can't do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

For instance, Clinton who was unquestionably the smartest of the bunch I talked to - both the ones who made it and didn't. He had a great interest in policy.

Well, what happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

When Howard Dean started saying some honest things, they hung him.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.

Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

Naming a transition team varies with the intentions of the candidate; some candidates have been careful to name a transition team as much as a year in advance.

I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

There are a lot of movies I'd like to throw away. That's not to say that I went in with that attitude. Any film I ever started, I went in with all the hope and best intentions in the world, but some films just don't work.

Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.

It's amazing how much you can learn if your intentions are truly earnest.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.

The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need.

It is not enough to be well-intentioned; one must strive to put those intentions into action in a capable way. One must consider the effect his actions will have on others. Looked at like this, to persist in ignorance is itself dishonorable.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

But last year there were 540,000 people, roughly, detained coming across the border illegally. Forty-five thousand of them came from countries other than Mexico, demonstrating the fact that Mexico itself now is a pathway into the United States for people all around the world, and we don't know what their intentions are.

But I learned first-hand how the news media operates by watching how they interpreted, changed, and misrepresented my intentions.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

A key to the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents - America chief among them - by their worst deeds.

When I got on the airplane in Indonesia coming to Japan, my intentions was to turn myself in to the military for the simple reason I would like to put my daughters with their mother, one thing. Another thing, I'd like to clear my conscience.

Good intentions are not enough. They've never put an onion in the soup yet.

I had, before I went to college, I had taken a few years off after high school and really had, I guess in those days, I had no intentions of going to college.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.

Let them be reassured, it has never been one of our intentions to ban religion in society, but solely to protect the national education system from any conspicuous display of religious affiliation.

Intentions count in your actions.