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 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.

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.

Oh, to be the author of prison letters. It's a young girl's dream come true.

Our lie is like a cancer that's spread to every single area of our lives.

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.

Women's liberationists spread the word that the only peaceful family is one in which either the wife is enslaved or the husband is androgynous.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

I guess when people feel intimidated or they see something having success they steal it. I don't judge 'em for it but I'm starting to notice that.

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.

Be a gift and a benediction.