I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.

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.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

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.

My audience is going to die before I do.

Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?

The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.

We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry.

I discovered that Robert Todd Lincoln was there for each of the first three assassinations. I wanted to write about the Lincoln Memorial, so when I found out he had attended its dedication, that helped focus it further.

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.

In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy.

I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.

Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.

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.

What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

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.

Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

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.

You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can't draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That's really critical.

I wish people would take more care of the countryside.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

There is simply no room for anti-Semitism in a democratic and law-abiding state.

Jesus didnt say Blessed are those who care for the poor. He said Blessed are we where we are poor where we are broken. It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.

I like playing characters with as many emotions as possible. I'd love to play a really crazy person - someone truly out of her mind.

You're hot for two seconds, and you're struggling to get work again. If it were easy, I don't think that's a good place for an artist to work from.

Teenage girls in television and film, in my experience, oftentimes are portrayed as either the sweet, innocent virgin or the super-sexy, experienced, town bicycle. There never seems to be an in-between. I think most girls are somewhere in between those two tropes.

I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.

Dieting by portion control doesn't work because one is constantly fighting addictive drives.

Enthusiasm moves the world.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack.

Kicks are my forte. I've got strong legs and high kicks. And I've got very good reach, obviously.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

I have to have my coffee. I probably have three cups a day, but only before noon.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

If you focus on what you left behind you will never see what lies ahead.

Good for you, you have a heart, you can be a liberal. Now, couple your heart with your brain, and you can be a conservative.