My audience is going to die before I do.

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.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.

The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.

I sometimes read on the subway, but I'm a hopeless eavesdropper and get easily distracted by strangers' conversations.

The Church's teaching isn't an official statement, but the cumulative understanding of all the people who have loved and experienced Jesus through time.

We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.

I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

You have no control over the market. You can't predict where it will go, and you can't bring it back from the depths. What you can do is save more. Make sure you have cash on hand - an emergency fund of at least six months of expenses.

Smile at strangers and you just might change a life.

I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

Trying is always enough.

We don't like what we don't know or understand. Parents don't like the thought of their kids embracing social media because they don't fully understand the benefits and dangers.

People are always alert to any change and skeptical by nature.

Loyalty isn't grey. It's black and white. You're either loyal completely, or not loyal at all.

We all have our painful pasts we have to get through.

I love my service; I'm going to finish my four years and be very proud of it.

The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness and it would consume you without hesitation.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

Even the weak become strong when they are united.