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

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

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.

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.