As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.

The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, instead of falling.

Which is one of the dangers of immersion journalism: you can find yourself getting sucked into battles you have nothing to do with, in this case an ongoing battle between Muslims.

All life deserves respect, dignity, and compassion.

So what did you do, drug me, stuff me in the trunk, then dump me like a sacrificial offering into that vampire’s coffin? - Shella

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

Jesse reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of... oh, hey, single-malt scotch. Some SOFs did know how to live.

Nightmares are at all times better than real life

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

Sometimes love comes around and it knocks you down just get back up when it knocks you down

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

God forbid that all children, of whom daily so great a multitude die, would perish, but that also for these, the merciful God, who wishes no one to perish, has procured some remedy unto salvation.

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.