I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage.

I think the first thing is to recognize a mistake that Obama made. And others have made in thinking that you can revolutionize a system that's unbelievably complex and interlinked, one-sixth of the economy. That was a mistake because whenever you change one thing, it changes 80 other things, and now if you're changing everything at once, you have no idea what the outcome is going to be and you get all of these unintended side effects.

If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.

Where there is a confluence of interests among nations, as, for example the swine flu or polio, you can get well functioning international institutions like the World Health Organization. And you can act. Climate change is different, because the science remains hypothetical and the potential costs staggering.

There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.