In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.

To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that's the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.

I have never belonged to a party. I don't have party affiliation.

I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.

The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously.

Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

When you give without expectations, your soul dances and sparkles with deep inner joy.

You don’t have to pay the sun to rise, the moon to shine, and the stars to glow.

Foolish: It's all foolish. Life is a farce a stupid, sickening farce played out by fools.

I think people can learn from my experience - you know, any young people who are under pressure, whether you work on Wall Street or you work in a factory in Alabama, and young journalists.

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

Well, baseball was my whole life. Nothing's ever been as fun as baseball.

Name me a society that doesn't love barbeque. It doesn't exist. Mankind is barbeque celebration.

People always tell me I'm too modest, and that I'm allowed to tell myself now and then that I'm good at something. Well okay then, the bathroom is very (beautiful) clean right now.