The notion that big business and big labor and big government can sit down around a table somewhere and work out the direction of the American economy is at complete variance with the reality of where the American economy is headed. I mean, it's like dinosaurs gathering to talk about the evolution of a new generation of mammals.

I think there has been an unfortunate tendency for a lot of different groups to forget that distinction between natural law and revealed truth and to say: Our complete agenda is to be enacted into laws governing the entire society. Many different religious groups claim that authority, not only Catholics. A lot of different Protestant groups as well are stepping forward to say: Here is our agenda, it is a moral agenda, ergo it must be enacted into law. I think that the distinction between natural law and more ultimate kinds of doctrine is being lost.

I have no question that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that abortion in virtually all circumstances is wrong. I think the church's position at all times in modern history has been that it is unequivocally opposed to abortion.But that's not the question for a Catholic who is a public official. I happen to subscribe to the church's position as a person. Still the question, as Governor Mario Cuomo suggested, is: what is your obligation as a civic leader? I agree entirely with John F. Kennedy. I answer only to my conscience in my public life and that's that.

Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

I am one of those people who deeply resents not having been born in the 19th century, when there were still open places to explore.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

Taxes are the flip side of expenditures. The same issues apply on both sides. There are questions of fairness and justice as much in the way you take money away as in the way you disburse it.