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.

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 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.

None of us wants any more war.

An anniversary is a celebration of the triumph and tragedy of love.

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

At the beginning and the middle and the end of all things, there is only the perfection of enlightenment that is nirvana.

The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

The death penalty experiment has failed.

I'm not commercial, I'm not for Special K cereal and I'm not a Wheaties boy; I'm a little bit more avant-garde, a little bit more out there.

Silence is a source of great strenght.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

I love Karlie Kloss. I want to bake cookies with her!