“It's a good thing you and your pills weren't around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You'd have drugged "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Taking of Christ" right the hell out of them.”

Remarks allegedly made about Barack Obama to Ted Kennedy in 2008, as quoted in Game Change : Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010) in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
Attributed

Defending the film Life of Brian on BBC chat show Friday Night Saturday Morning (9 November 1979)

Chicago '91 (1991)

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Colossians 3:1
Epistle to the Colossians

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

"Blood and Oil," The Economist (March 4, 2000), p. 68

1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)
Context: It might seem at first thought to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called "secession" or "rebellion." The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much pride in and reverence for the history and Government of their common country as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. With rebellion thus sugar coated they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such thing the day before.