A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them. Like them, he was slandered and misunderstood.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

It was like being seen after a perpetual darkness, I replied. To be heard after a lifetime of silence.

A person who's going to be famous usually drops a few clues by the time they're twenty-one.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they have a gun).

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness

People think photography is about photographing. To me, it’s about relationships.

When you have attained the way of strategy there will be nothing that you cannot understand. You will see the way in everything.

When government misleads the country about a terrorist attack, that erodes trust.

Even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.