Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

Passion paralyzes good taste.

A good book is an education of the heart.

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.