Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, Those who can, do, those who cant, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa status must never be abused.

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.