All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle.

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.

There is more to military units than hardware. There is the character of the unit's personnel: their strengths, experience, and knowledge, their ability to get along and work together amid the horrors of the battlefield. There is an almost undefinable quality. That quality is the Marine Corps' secret weapon. Their edge. That quality is their ethos.

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.

There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.