An occupying power has no right to make significant alterations in the character of the occupied society, to change the laws all around, without a strong security reason and so forth.

If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.

I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.

Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.

My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.

I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.

It's not proper for a professor to go before a class and promote one party or another. That's not academic scholarship.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

Public interest in most of the Middle East was slight at that time; the Arab-Israeli conflict was all that people were interested in and that was not my specialty.

I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.

I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.

You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.

restraint equals indulgence

It is a universal principle that whenever one refuses to use his God-given powers, these powers decay and perish.

I grew up in an era where an orchestra was like a treasure chest.

Behind everyone's learned behaviors and odd eccentricities lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego.

The foes from whom we pray to be delivered are our own passions, appetites, and follies; and against these there is always need that we should war.

...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?