What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

I tell young people: If you make a job choice on the basis of something other than your nose or your gut, it's unlikely to work out.... It's perilous to look ahead and be like, "I'd like to be ambassador." I would never have gone to Bosnia or spent years writing about genocide. Do it on the basis of what you can learn.... It's like falling in love. Your whole dating life, you're thinking, On the one hand, on the other hand. Then you meet the right guy, and you're not in list-making mode; you're just with the person you're supposed to be with. Jobs are like that too.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.