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.

I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.

I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!

The movie that changed my life, ' he liked to say, by which he meant that it had changed his wardrobe.

Good men who exercise power are really the most fascinating of all people.

And knowledge management is a means, not an end.

Never love for me, only obsession.

In 1968, I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry, and unhappy like we do.

No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing. He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

I just think music is one of those frontiers where people really want the "I" to be you.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.