You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions-and Iraq may be one of them-when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

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

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

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

You're never really out of politics.

If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.