All the best reasons for going into politics never really change: the desire for glory and fame and the chance to do something that really matters, that will make life better for a lot of people.

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.

Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.

Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both?

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

There are no techniques in politics.

Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.

I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy.

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.

Not even a superpower can hold onto its economic sovereignty if it fails to get its fiscal house in order, and no one needs a well-regulated international economic order more than the United States.

An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.

I don't want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, 'Well, I passed.' My mum used to say life isn't for sissies.

'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.

What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'

It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.

Democratic constitutions do allow some suspension of rights in states of emergency. Thus rights are not always trumps. But neither is necessity. Even in times of real danger, political authorities have to prove the case that abridgments of rights are justified.

The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

A proper criminal justice system exacts justice - that is, punishes criminals for their crimes. Rehabilitation and deterrence are worthy goals, but they are secondary to retribution.

For the Left, Thanksgiving is about politics; for the Right, politics is about thanksgiving. The different approaches to holiday conversation come from opposing views of politics.

What is the purpose of the electoral college? It has a few purposes. One, it's to restrain pure democracy. Very good, very important, that's a wonderful thing.

For Christians, Advent reminds us why we need Christmas in the first place. It relies not only the grace of God but also the assent of Mary to the divine will.

While liberal, coastal white girls may constitute the most conspicuous purveyors of pumpkin spice, the flavor's cultural connotations and the strong opinions they elicit reveal the drink's profound conservatism.

Media elites, particularly those on the Left, love to hate the pumpkin spice latte.

Civil society begins with the family.

People go into debt when they judge it beneficial to borrow money against their future earnings. Few can afford to buy a house outright, but many consider it worthwhile to take out a loan, which they will service and pay off over time, for the immediate privilege of living and investing in a house.

The purpose of language is to communicate. That's the most basic definition of language. I have my own subjective experience going on in my head, and you have your own subjective experience going on in your head. The only way we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.

According to the politics of fantasy, mankind is on the verge of perfectibility, if only we give the government just a little bit more money and power.

There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren't.

Everyone suffers. Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. It falls on both the rich and the poor too. Leftist materialists imagine suffering to be a factor of economic circumstance.

In more tangible terms, the pumpkin spice latte shares many of the qualities that endear conservative politicians to their supporters and arouse disgust in their opponents. It's blunt, common, and unapologetically American.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

All political debates, from tax policy to abortion, draw on moral arguments that rest on religious premises.

Beauty is not generic, bland, and clinical. It isn't all things to all people. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in its endlessly intricate detail was beautiful. Modern office buildings are not.