Brokenness is the operative issue of our time - broken souls, broken hearts, broken places.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

An inferiority complex distorts reality

We call them grunters. They're ghost hunters but grunters is more appropriate because most of them are pigs.

If your partner is angry with you, recognize that his anger is a misdirected plea for love. Your partner's simply upset because he feels something you said or did was a sign of not loving him enough.

The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them.

US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and I have repeatedly sought to emphasize that the progress in Iraq is fragile and also, possibly, reversible.

I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

Some things were too hard to believe, however entertaining they might be to hear or read.

It does not matter what happens when we have gone.

The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman - they remain beautiful and the snub recoils.