I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.