>Canoeing just feels normal and natural. When you’re out there stress leaks out of you like a bucket with holes in it.

>I came back [from a wilderness camp in Northern Idaho] in the summer of ’87 and I thought it would be interesting to either go to Antarctica or run for Congress. But the people had already signed up for the Antarctic. So I ran for Congress.

>I grew up in a Republican household, but it wasn’t a matter of ideology as much as it was economics. I was an independent, but it cost $300 to file as an independent. It cost $100 to file as a Democrat or Republican.

>Did I enjoy campaigning? Let me ask you something: Would you enjoy irritable bowel syndrome? Would you like kidney stones?...Crohn’s disease? That’s how I saw it. In ’08, when I lost the primary, the job was just alien to every fiber in my being. It was a big relief. It was just eating at the marrow of my bones. Not so much that I minded the travel or the work or the hours you had to put into it, what I minded was the lack of productivity. You’d have all this information, but no one was interested. ... You could ask experts from all over the world for information and you’d bring it to meetings or hearings and nobody was interested.

>It seems they were more interested in getting their name as being present at the hearing and then talking to the press about something and then scheduling a fundraiser or a campaign event. They were not focused on the issue of the hour. They were simply handed questions and statements by their staff or talking on their phones or Blackberries. I don’t think John Adams had a Blackberry.

>The Democrats were as bad as the Republicans. They just had a different constituency to please.

>Every Gulf Coast Republican is the biggest anti-environmentalist you can imagine. And these Gulf Coast Republicans—and to some extent Gulf Coast Democrats, too—these Gulf Coast Republicans voted to eliminate the Endangered Species Act. They voted for the ‘Dirty Water Act’ in 1995 [a bill to weaken the Clean Water Act]. Every time we tried to bring in some really good environmental policy—whether it was fisheries or clean air or preserving wetlands or managing the oceans or whatever it was—they voted against it. They brought in Big Oil and now they’re all crying foul: ‘All of the fishermen are out of work! The oil is killing our marshes!’ Well, no kiddin’. Look what you did for 30 years.

>Green on the outside and communist pink on the inside —that’s what I’ve been called on a number of occasions.

>To me, all you have to do is pretty logical. We’re on this little green planet in the midst of an infinite hostile environment where no human can live. We depend on the natural resources from nature’s design, developed over millions and millions of years in a co-evolutionary fashion, and here we are at this particular moment of Earth’s evolution and the human population is bulging, raping the resources and degrading the planet that we depend on with no thought, thinking that this is the way it is.

>You know for every one person trying to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, a thousand are degrading it. And the problem with that is, they either know they’re degrading it and they don’t care, or most of them don’t know they’re degrading it. It’s the fundamental pervasive ignorance of where you fit into nature’s design.

>When I came back from Vietnam I didn’t go to college right away. I ended up living in a boardinghouse in Maine for $9 a week slaughtering chickens. That was pretty cool. I sort of got run over by a chicken truck and broke my leg and that ended my chicken career.

>What does it feel like to get shot? It feels like you’ve just gotten run over by a big truck. ... I couldn’t breathe. The first thing I thought of was my older brother Clifford when we were 10 years old in the backyard playing stickball, and I got a little too close to the swing of the stick, and he hit me in the stomach and I couldn’t breathe. And Clifford said, ‘Relax and breathe through your nose.’ And that’s what I did. I got real calm. I relaxed. I took short breaths and I could breathe.

>What happens [with politicians] is that they give up their souls. And then they stop questioning what they’re doing. And then—boom!—before you know it, they’re living their life with no meaning or purpose other than to stay in office.

>What did I like about [Congress]? I think I liked sitting in an orphanage in Ethiopia run by German nuns, tragically as it is, with children dying of AIDS. ...And then you could appropriate money to that specific place.

>The war in Iraq, I would have voted against it, having found out that a couple years later that little we were told by the Administration was true.

>In ’05 we had a really good discussion with the CIA in Damascus. ... The station chief in Syria, head CIA guy, he just laid it out for us. The whole thing was a sham. The big question was, Where did all the weapons of mass destruction go? They all went to Syria, that was everybody’s assumption because that was what the Administration was saying because [they] were toying with the idea of invading Syria. The CIA station chief started out the conversation by saying, ‘There are no WMDs in Syria’. Just like that. You want to know why? Because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—and there hadn’t been since 1991, the first Persian Gulf War. We obliterated all of them. And we put sanctions against Iraq, so there was no money to build them back.

>Sometimes they [constituents] would poke me if they didn’t like my vote. Oh, yeah, they’d stick their finger in my chest—especially when I started turning against the war in Iraq. I started pokin’ back.

>The three most important things for [a new congressman] is to be informed, be competent, and have integrity. And think for yourself. Don’t become a lapdog for some lobby group because you need money for your campaign. Be bold about what you do because so many members are afraid that they’ll lose votes in the election and they become timid legislators. And timid legislators then become less informed, less competent, and they lose their integrity.

>There’s always been a certain amount of partisanship. It’s natural—you’re on one team. But there’s also been congeniality between rivals. ... But there’s been a gradual shift to partisanship with bitterness. And bitterness is not a good foundation for lucid thinking. It creates this barrier to emotional maturity and tolerance.

>I can tell you right now if [Sean] Hannity and [Rush] Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are taking over the Republican Party, you, in essence, have the perfect formula for ignorance, arrogance, and dogma, which has been the undoing of civilizations from the dawn of time.

>[In the end] I was thinking about becoming a Democrat. Or I would have stayed a Republican and retained my independent thought. I was becoming much less interested in party politics. Never had much interest in them anyway.

>I don’t think about being happy or unhappy. I grew up during a time when your parents weren’t concerned if you were happy or not, so you don’t have that inside of you. I think being curious and free to follow your curiosity is what gives you a sense of contentment.

>If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it.