All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The war on terror, I believe, will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

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 empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

In my experience, it's not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.