I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on - it was sent directly to Hoover - that - the director should see this - `And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.

The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.

I've I call [Cardinal John O'Connor] from time to time and he calls me. And when I think there's something he ought to think about doing, I call him and he usually does it.

Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is not hard to do.

What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].

The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet.[Barack] Obama has done nothing about that.

This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the [Barack] Obama administration are not believable.