If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.

The mercy caravans are through there the medicine refugees flowing out. It makes the United States look very bad here. And much more like an occupation force than it did before.

Life has become terribly insecure. It's on the vortex of civil war. It's difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up good will.

If you can find a way to confound people's prejudices, restore the humanity of people, individuals, you restore them to life.

You need to be hyper-aware because it's your survival at stake.

I think that feeling of reward comes from being able to find sometimes an unexpected reflection or insight that seems to transcend the description itself, where you actually realize you're concluding something that is a point of view, that may come across and actually touch people's conscience or minds in a way that could change, at least if not things, change points of view.

It is important to know how influential people think and perceive their countrymen, let's say, especially when you are talking about people in power. I think it can be very revealing how they regard themselves and their relationship or their responsibility to their countrymen. That is vital for us all to know and in order to be able to judge them and evaluate them.