No historian should be trusted implicitly.

The best traveler is one without a camera.

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles whom we knew.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

I think our children are afraid to die because we're afraid to die.

As a child I had terrible asthma.

I had been working on a second book with [David] Petraeus called Relentless. Obviously that book and the income that it would have generated went away.

Once a vegan, we are always so, because our motivation is not personal and self-oriented, but is based on concern for others and on our undeniable interconnectedness with other living beings.

Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.