Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one.