Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

The United States is not overdeployed or overextended with deployments in 150 countries on any given year. On any given week we have about 65 deployments.

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.