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.

Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.

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

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?

If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn potholes.

What Americans cant face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

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