Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.

A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.

I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

I have searched my mind for some justification for why I can't be reporting in a calm and heavily defended American city and cannot find one. I don't like being told when I can and cannot walk on the streets and take pictures.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.