We dont see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and its a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.

You know, great powers don't get angry, great powers don't make decisions hastily in a crisis.

Protecting Afghan civilians is the cornerstone of our mission.

Afghanistan is going to be here a long time, and what's critical is that Afghanistan's relationship with its neighbors are, to the maximum extent they can be, constructive and operationally useful.

There are problems in the world today.

I seek as much as I can to mitigate risk.

The thing that I'm always left with is this overwhelming desire for people to be rooted and the only way that they feel rooted is through another person.

We dont want the Taliban to put down roots, or the al Qaeda to put down roots in Afghanistan that can facilitate Afghanistan becoming - once again - a launching pad for international terrorism.

We need to understand what we're saying matters.

Planning is really the hallmark of any large military formation, and it's typically a weakness in new formations and new armies.

We need to have a commander-in-chief who knows what she is doing.

I witness that I’m out of alignment with my power. I choose to see peace instead of this.

The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That's what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Fortunately, I am accustomed to creating amusement inadvertently.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

I have always loved lipstick. For women, that love comes from our mother and grandmothers. It's so natural for a woman to open up her mirror and apply lipstick

We spend too much time as people thinking about what we don't have instead of actually making a change, and we just need to make that change now because we're being giving the opportunity.

God gives us abundant material blessing so that we can give it away, and give it generously.

Fools follow rules when the set commands ya...