Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest - sometimes with extensive borrowing - when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

I think there are worse things than war. For example, injustice.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.

The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

A flower just blooms without knowing who will enjoy and appreciate her beauty.

The winners of life's game always set and have goals in focus that they score to fulfill their purposes of existence and making the planet earth to celebrate joy

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

It is difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth.

Freedom is not a self-preserving gift. It has to be earned, and it has to be protected.

Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

Shouldn't the low strings be at the bottom?

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.