[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom.

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Homophobia: the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

Don't fool yourself that you're blogging when you're really just putting stuff up online.

The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, "Then there's no hope for me, Mum."

I think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

My favorite genre is definitely romantic comedy. I love 'When Harry Met Sally.'

I don't know how I know that, but I do. I can feel the beat of that truth inside me. Taste it bitter on my tongue. Sometimes, like now, I didn't think I want to know who I really am.

Come from your knees to the sermon, and come from the sermon to your knees

Peace is the state where love abides and seeks to share itself.

Most safely shall you tread the middle path.

There is no satisfaction in any good without a companion.

In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.

The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza.