A generation ago [the Democratic Party] stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics.

I am being very humble about the Arab Spring. There's kind of a competition out there, you might have noticed, of who can be the first to say the Arab Spring is going to fail. Everyone says, "I told you so, I told you so about the Muslim Brotherhood." I have no desire to tell anyone anything. I don't know. I'm just listening, watching. It may turn out all these people are right, they may be wrong. They may be right this year and wrong next year, by the way. I'm just trying to listen day to day, figure it out.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you five, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you ninety-seven, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking to is operating with a wholly different logic from your own.

Remember, the difference between the world frozen over, in an ice ball, and the warming period we're in now is just 6 degrees centigrade. A change of just 1 degree can have a huge effect.

Combating climate change requires government policy, and most conservatives hate the idea of more government regulation. Because they hate the prescription, they deny the diagnosis.

The great thing about cheap natural gas, again it's cheap, and it provides a cleaner alternative to coal. But it's still a fossil fuel, and because it's still a fossil fuel, it still emits carbon.

There is definitely global warming, and man is definitely contributing to it. Go out to, say, Montana and talk to some pretty conservative people, hunters and fishermen. They know that in the trout stream they fished when they were growing up, the trout are stressed because the water temperature is going up. They know the hunting season has been delayed because the snows are coming later, and therefore the elk aren't coming down from the mountains.