We have built something [a nuclear stockpile] bigger than we can drive.

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

It is hard to stay patient about policy matters where everybody agrees about what needs to be done and then it just doesn't happen, like reforming the immigration system and getting rid of family immigration jails and closing Guantanamo and criminal-justice reform. All these issues, there is basically consensus. There's no rational objections whatsoever, but it can't happen because of other stupid steps we have to take in politics.

I'm in favor of outing when people have demonized or scapegoated gay people for their own public gain. When they have risen to public prominence on the backs of the gay community that they are part of and they prey on, I think that's absolutely deserving of outing.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.

I feel like Americans have always studied nationalism as a foreign phenomenon. And now, we`ve got a nationalist movement in our country that has a very articulate spokesman in the senior counselor to the president [Donald Trump].