The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's 'Nightline.'

Judges are the weakest link in our system of justice and they are also the most protected.

The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

There are many levels of truth.

It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.

I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.

Without confidence we feel insecure. We replay the doubting voices of our parents on a loop in our own minds.

Mortals trotted about in shoes and corsets made to limit movement, fashion for prey.

Maybe I’m just farsighted. The further away something is, the better I can see it but once it gets close, I lose sight of it.

I do a few jokes about the economy but from an everyday person perspective. People like to laugh, and they especially like to laugh during difficult circumstances.

Teaching is too vital an occupation to be left to the lazy or greedy or negative

You cannot underestimate the sharpness of people’s BS radar. They can spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away.

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience". "What's pessimism?" I said. "Religion without God.

Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.

Music is everything; without it, we [people] are nothing. We're just living vibrations of molecular tinglings, and without music we'd explode into nothing and go down a quantum hole.