Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.

We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.