I don't think a monarchy led by 75- and 80-year-old men [Saudi Arabia] in today's modern world is really sustainable.

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.

Our president's latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

Your boss doesn't care what you know, because the Google machine knows everything. Your boss cares about what you can do with what you know. That's the only thing your boss will pay for.

Even if America tomorrow - and it won't happen overnight - but if we did reduce our demand for gas and natural gas and crude oil by a significant degree, that does have an exponential effect on producers in the Middle East, everything else being equal. But if China's demand is growing and India's demand is growing, they are not going back.

If e-mail had been around before the telephone was invented, people would have said, 'Hey, forget e-mail! With this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people!'.

I think that competition will exist even if we discover more oil. We're never going to know how much we have, or how long will it last. You are always going to want to have diversity of supply. I think the Middle East will remain a region of competition, of global competition, fighting for a long time.