Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.

Politicians have the same occupational hazard as generals - focusing on the last battle and overreacting to that.

People say you favor assassination, what do you think war is? Except that it's assassination on a much larger scale, a much more horrific scale.

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.

Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.