After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

Here is a guy who's supposed to be the Genghis Khan of the church, the pro-choice people hate him, and I don't know about his labor background so I figured there must be more to him, and there is. I wrote a book about [John Cardinal O'Connor].

I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.

The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

I don't think [Bill Clinton] does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.

I really envy, in some respects, some of the people of faith I've known - A.J.[Muste], for example.