I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.