When I get asked the question, "Do I want to loan you money?" I want to know, how much do you earn? How much do you owe? What is your net worth? When people talk about countries for some reason they only ask how much did you earn and what's your debt?

Italy is the fourth-largest economy in Europe and the eighth-largest economy in the world, and its banking system is collapsing. And Germany is desperate. It must maintain its standard of living. It can only do that with exports and Deutsche Bank is very exposed to Italian debt. But so is the rest of Europe.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

Assad's mother was a terror. He was terrified of her and she kept saying to him, you're not like your father. That's interesting, but it's useless information. It doesn't tell me anything about how the first and second armored brigades are going to operate.

Success looks like you sitting here pretty confident that an armed brigade isn't going to come pouring in here and blow your head off. Which I don't think is your major concern. Therefore, the United States' foreign policy is successful.

We cannot anticipate the moral circumstances under which we will live. And therefore [I refuse] to say that I will not live in a moral circumstance that requires violence.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.