To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

In interviews I gave early on in my career, I was quoted as saying it was possible to have it all: a dynamic job, marriage, and children. In some respects, I was a social adolescent.

As an actor, you just want to continue to work on things that you like. You can be in this business a long time and consistently working and just be totally artistically unfulfilled.

Tax avoidance and evasion by the rich undermine democracy by starving social programs and public services. They also send a message to ordinary citizens that the rules of the economic game are rigged against them.

I'm blessed to be living this dream of writing and singing, but that's not the real dream I had. The real dream was to make enough money to take care of all the pain and suffering that my mother has been through.