We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.