Clint Eastwood's speech was kind of a metaphor for the entire Republican Party: A confused old person yelling at something that doesn't exist.

I don't think all life is precious. I know people say that all the time, "Life is precious." I think some life is precious, and some life is just a waste of protoplasm. Start over.

The key to me, in religion, is just to treat it like it doesn't really matter. We have a Pope, we don't really believe him, we don't really listen to what he says, we don't really take him seriously. That's what has to happen with religion. It has to be marginalized and in the Islamic world, it's not marginalized, it's taken literally.

I'd like to protect children, too, but... is everything worth sacrificing to that? I mean, drugs have done a lot of good... They've midwived a lot of good ideas... lot of great songs, you know? I think "Penny Lane" is worth 10 dead kids... I think Dark Side of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids. There, I said it.

In ten Muslim countries you can get the death penalty just for being gay. If they were chopping the heads off of gay people in the Vatican, wouldn't there be a greater outcry among liberals?

I have always defined political correctness as an elevation of sensitivity over truth.

It's so easy to demagogue the issue and make someone who speaks out against the internal-combustion engine sound like an insane communist, when the truth is that the internal-combustion engine is the biggest threat to my life in the next 25 years, in terms of what it's doing to our environment and how it's depleting the ozone layer and so forth.