Can it be that a generation of school children is growing up heedless of the simple truth that the Pentagon's centrla role for many years has been to buy weapons that don't work, against threats that don't exist?

The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences

So much for the crusade against drugs . . . all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.