It's not possible to put into words the sense of loss and grief that comes to a family that loses one of their children.

You know, great powers don't get angry, great powers don't make decisions hastily in a crisis.

Protecting Afghan civilians is the cornerstone of our mission.

Afghanistan is going to be here a long time, and what's critical is that Afghanistan's relationship with its neighbors are, to the maximum extent they can be, constructive and operationally useful.

There are problems in the world today.

I seek as much as I can to mitigate risk.

The thing that I'm always left with is this overwhelming desire for people to be rooted and the only way that they feel rooted is through another person.

We dont want the Taliban to put down roots, or the al Qaeda to put down roots in Afghanistan that can facilitate Afghanistan becoming - once again - a launching pad for international terrorism.

We need to understand what we're saying matters.

Planning is really the hallmark of any large military formation, and it's typically a weakness in new formations and new armies.

We need to have a commander-in-chief who knows what she is doing.

I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

The question is not whether Scotland can survive as a separate state. Of course it could.

This is one of the benefits, as well as one of the difficulties of directing a member of your family. You know where the buttons are. You can push them if you want.

The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.

Sometimes the most ordinary things are the ones we learn to miss the most.

I'm known in the trade as Litigiousness because, which means to say I'm willing to pull people into court straight away, no messing, thank you.

I have a feeling that any simple problem can be made arbitrarily difficult by imposing a suitably heavy administrative process around the development.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.