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.

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

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

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

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.

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.