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

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.

The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.

Quite a lot of the girls I get photographed with are just friends and then, according to the papers, I have, like, 7,000 girlfriends.

But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

I won't be satisfied until I've put the entire security industry out of work.

In the worst of times the best among us never lose their moral compass, and that is how they emerge relatively unscathed.

Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it.

I've never tried to achieve anything. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.

So long as you have food in your mouth you have solved all questions for the time being.

I had not been in the jazz environment, having been brought up in the church. But once I got to New York, and I was signed to perform at The Village Gate and the Vanguard and clubs like that, and these - the Vanguard was one of the most elite, if not the most elite, jazz club out there.

I'm not trying to be the new anybody.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

I'm such a late bloomer.

I think it's the actor's job - when you think of being typecast or getting out of the shadow of whatever you've had success in - it's up to you as an actor. The industry will always want to hire you for what you were successful in last and what made money. But you can say no to that and look for other parts.

I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.

When you watch television shows, as good as they are, like 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'Touched by an Angel,' everything is this kind of mishmash of faith but not any specific religion.

The conversation of how you do a play is my favorite conversation in the whole wide world: what a play is, why it's different than anything else, the math of the way that human behavior has to be calibrated theatrically versus anything else.

Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality.

It's possible that the 2012 general-election race will be the least overtly religious one since 1972, the last campaign before Roe v. Wade and the rise of Jimmy Carter brought evangelicalism into the political mainstream. That's because faith remains a complicated issue for Obama, who is still wrongly thought to be a Muslim in some quarters.

I can't remember writing any of the songs that I've written.

If you are sad, if you are heartbroken, make yourself up, dress up, add more lipstick and attack. Men hate women who weep.