"We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn't do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell."

"I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war."

"In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can't afford it. And I refuse to renew them again."

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

"If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do."

"To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination."

"Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution."

"Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences."