Health care is a need; it's not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you're very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you're not sick, you shouldn't have a lot of it.

In economic terms, health care is a highly successful industry - profitable, growing, and virtually recession-proof - but it's a massive burden on the rest of the economy.

The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.

The use of psychoactive drugs - including both antidepressants and antipsychotics - has exploded...[yet] 'the tally of those who are disabled...increased nearly two and a half times.

Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.

Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending?

I do think that we are an overmedicated society.

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease. Theres a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful.

Brand-name drugs have no competition, since the government grants them very long, exclusive marketing rights.

We should be willing to spend the money in return for the innovation.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

We never know which of us will start the chain reaction. But one of us will.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war

Delicacy is to the affections what grace is to the beauty.

No word makes me happier than the word "daddy" when it's directed to me.

She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.

The thing about the banjo is when you first hear it, it strikes many people as what's that? There's something very compelling about it to certain people.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.