You have an electorate [in America] that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.

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.

[Bill Clinton] has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.

An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way [Barack] Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system.

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.

[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.

Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.