Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

In counterfactual history, nothing is certain.

... what's in a person's heart and soul will not likely be changed by the ability to command a helicopter to land on the South Lawn.

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give it.

Presidents by six years have been there long enough for the media and the country to see their flaws.

It is very difficult for [people] to accept the idea that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy.

The art of diplomacy is finding a reasonable route among imperfect alternatives.

JFK to RFK: To survive in politics, you sometimes have to be willing to make fun of yourself.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

God is a cloud from which rain fell.

The worst pain you can imagine is when something you love goes away and nothing you can do will ever bring it back.

I'm a human being. I feel all emotions. I'm not just happy all the time. Sometimes, I'm sad and feel the blues. Sometimes I even want to feel the blues. Sometimes, you want to feel down.

Now is always the hardest time to invest.

My feeling about the Internet or anything else is that the more it tends to become a cult, the more I want to call it into question.

When you do a thing with your whole soul and everything that is noble within you, you always find your counterpart.

I wasn't even a theater kid in high school. I studied classical piano, and I ran track.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.

Once you have found out what you love to do, there is only one goal: to be the best in the world at it.