Well, I won't say what I thought about them, particularly related to Bill Gates, but I would say it's astounding to me how human people are. I mean, it, here you had a guy that was a convicted guy, a sensational con man, and the percentage of people that he knocked off. I mean, whether it was, he found their weakness, it might have been sex. It might be power, it might be, whatever it might be.

How people need the possibility of sharing, of not being alone. It’s bad to be poor, but it’s difficult to be alone.

Well, don’t you think that we are all like that? I mean in some ways the deepest fear for a lot of people is getting to the end of their life and think that they did it wrong.

So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.

Could I imagine a world without cursing? Hell, no! Every place I've ever gone, people have had to hold their ears.

But if our institutions of democracy are not working, that is an even greater threat to our national security

And I never forgot what he said, Bill Clinton. He looked at me, and he said, “You know, Leon, you can be the greatest OMB director in the history of the world, but nobody’s going to remember you if the White House has fallen apart!” I never forgot that.

Love of family is something that is renewed in me every time I see them.

When I have a sense that things are screwed up, and I’m just not sure whether or not we’ll find an answer, the thing I do is usually sit at the piano, and I play a song by Beethoven called Para Elisa (Für Elise)

The greatest fear I always had in the jobs I was in was that some son of a bitch I never knew or met was going to screw up, and I was going to get blamed for it. [laughs]