Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

The American political system is so porous, it's so open, it's so frustrating for those who are trying to make policy.

One thing worse than an America that is too strong, the world will learn, is an America that is too weak.