There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.

Not many people sleep with other men and when the other man leaves have a nervous breakdown.

It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric.

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true.