The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

Prostitution, black marketeering, and informing on ones neighbors and friends all had such a deep-rooted tradition in Romania that there was a charming naturalness and innocence about it.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

The God is our greatest Teacher.

Miracles await you when you begin to serve people

I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

When caught reading the Bible W.C. Fields said T'm looking for loopholes.' The Bible is nothing but a succession of civil rights struggles by the Jewish people against their oppressors.

And very often the influence exerted on a person's character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned.

There we were in the middle of a sexual revolution wearing clothes that guaranteed we wouldn't get laid.

A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

There are in woman's eyes two sorts of tears,--the one of grief, the other of deceit.

You're so good at helping everybody else, I think you're in danger of leaving yourself out of your own life.