“If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.”

“I think there's a green side to John Kerry, if you like, that he's an environmental activist. His record on the environment is as best as you have on a pro-environment record of anybody in the U.S. Senate.”

“It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.”

“There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.”

“The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.”

“Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.”

“One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.”

“If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there's a long friendship between the United States and Egypt.”

“Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'”

“Reagan never cottoned to dictators. He was pure in this notion in a true belief that democracy was the best solution in the world because it spoke to people's hopes and dreams and aspirations, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.”

“Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.”