Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

I refuse to buy a PS3 or Xbox for my home for fear that it might ruin my life. I think I would cease to accomplish anything productive, would quickly dispense with all human contact, and would very well end up with a nasty case of arthritis in my over-used digits from constant gameplay.

In Washington, if you're a congressman or a senator or the President, you make much more money than the average American, but you'd think that if you were the leader of the free world you'd be making major bank, and you don't.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.

In politics, it's very theatrical. There’s a lot of stage craft. The campaign is trying to tell a story that they want people to believe in, and candidates are playing the role, like actors, by a creative personae that people will be attracted to.