All the time I had my success, I didn't know what I was doing. I struggled and struggled and hacked things out without any insight as to why.

I was raised in the Methodist Church, which is a very Germanic, military kind of music they have there. I heard this other music on the radio: Pentecostal. That was right up my street.

I had a band with David Gates. There was just a lot of opportunity at that time. But I left for Los Angeles the week after I graduated high school, and I actually left to try to get into the advertising business. That was really why I went out to L.A. My music career was almost an accident.

My first job in a country band was after I moved to California.

We must draw a distinction between understanding and supporting Israel's values and existence, and criticising any Israeli government's policy.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain.

Obama's openness is a welcome change from his predecessor, who went all the way to the Supreme Court to hide the RSVP list for a single policy meeting. And transparency is intrinsically good, since in a democracy, very little government activity is legitimately secret.