"Really, if the old Penn Station had not been knocked down, at best it would have ended up annoyingly subdivided into a mall, like Union Station in Washington D.C., because that is the only thing that America can think of to do with its vast public spaces anymore."

"The moral is clear. Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic."

"Discipline! Those careless poor people, frittering away taxpayer dollars on heat! Don’t they know these are tough economic times?"

"Probably you have a lot of other things on your mind. Like money. Me, I spent last year working on a piecework contract rather than for a salary. That meant I got stuck carrying a big credit-card balance for several months, while my payment was in a very slow pipeline. People were not very quick about paying money for things last year. I bring this up because while I was carrying that balance, I mixed up my credit card with my ATM card one time, and so accidentally I took out a cash advance, which had a higher interest rate than the regular balance. When I called the credit-card company to tell them I wanted to pay off that high-interest balance first, they said I couldn’t. They had buried it at the bottom of the whole stack of other money I owed them, and the only way to get to it was to shovel away the entire low-interest balance first. So until I finally got enough cash to pay off the full balance, that cash advance just sat there, bleeding extra interest. But afterward, Congress—this crappy, infuriating, do-nothing Congress, this Congress that every single American despises—outlawed that scam. Credit-card companies now are required to pay down your highest-interest balances first. Maybe this is because Congress is a bunch of socialists trying to murder our free-enterprise system. Go ahead and vote for your Tea Party if you feel that way."

"I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it never leaves you. In some ways I am still there"

"Personally: if I get high, then drive, I’m not good. If I get high while driving, it’s gravy. It’s standing up between getting high and driving that does it."

"Mr. Stewart also promised to supply the crowd with signs if they did not bring their own, including as examples, “I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler,” and “Take It Down a Notch, America."

"The difference is, Bush could have done more with Katrina, but I don’t see what Obama can do with the Spill. He’s instructed: “Take personal command!” Should the President be our go-to guy on oil spills? “Express more emotion!” What is he, a head of state like the Queen, delegated to going places and looking concerned? He can try to pass some energy legislation, but both parties are in the pockets of Big Oil. Those few legislators who work for meaningful federal solutions are pilloried as “socialists.” God help us if we should attempt to slow the eagerness of corporations to consume us."

"Politically, I get the ‘let’s trip up the other side, make them fail’ strategy. But what’s more important, to win extra seats or to shape the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s? It was a go-for-all-the-marbles approach. Unless they produced an absolute failure for Mr. Obama, there wasn’t going to be any political benefit."