Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip [of Jules Feiffer]. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that.

We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.

[Bill Clinton] was the man, as a matter of fact, who, in terms of the Communications Decency Act, which would have made the Internet, the whole concept of cyberspace, vulnerable to rampant censorship - he pushed that bill, and I know the man in the Justice Department whom he persuaded - the guy didn't want to lose his job - to write the bill.

Sandra Day O'Connor - once she said that there are - there were no public schools in America until the 18th century, and she overlooked my alma mater because we started - I say we - in 1635. And among the people who went there - and they're on - the walls in the auditorium, the names are: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, except he split when he was 10 years old to go to work.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government,[Barack] Obama has reneged on his promises.

[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.

I've - that I regret. That was stupid and ignorant on my part. I went to a party as a guest of a friend of mine, a lawyer. And he had a client who I didn't know, except - maybe I'm pretending I didn't know, but he was a big investor in The New Yorker. And as I found out later in a book about The New Yorker, this guy was very unhappy about [Bill] Shawn.He thought Shawn was spending out - spending too much money on writers.