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

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

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

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 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.