 History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting. |
| Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot. |
| I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in. |
| Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead. |
| Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it. |
| Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge. |
| Relics are treasured as something close to the divine. |
| 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. |
| I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy. |
| 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. |
| My audience is going to die before I do. |
| I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good. |
| The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea. |
| I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln. |
| Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are? |
| We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry. |
| 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. |
| I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old. |
| What are you hiding? No one ever asks that. |
| One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. |
