Alternative media is no longer really alternative, and we're no longer that dependant upon newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, for our information.

I've never met any strong critic of the United States anywhere in the world who gave us any credit for having limit on government.

George W. Bush is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.

He [Reagan] likes to tell jokes and that's why he told the ethnic joke that got him into some trouble. Perhaps if reporters didn't overreact to a politician's telling the very same joke they routinely hear and tell in the city room, we'd get more humor.

The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

Eisenhower provided the first break in the Cold War, by bringing Khrushchev to the United States, in humanizing the Soviets; and then Nixon, by making the opening to China; and then Reagan, even meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev and acknowledging that nuclear weapons are a horror. So I won't accept that Republicans just escalate. Republicans, at least when they were more moderate, they were maybe even more isolationist, they sometimes brought sanity to the debate. We don't have that now. We have - all these Republicans have gone off the neoconservative deep end.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.