Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top

My lips are chapped from the winds of change.

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.

You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

The most precious love is often the kind that isn't returned, and that is given freely.

You only become funny when you have a complete reverence for life.

The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them - make them their own.

A good writer always works at the impossible.

This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself.

You can never plan what a song will do. I wrote Mr Pitiful song on a piano I paid $200 for and I definitely got my money's worth.

This was the kind of job that made legends out of hunters. Of course, to be a legend, you generally had to be dead.