“The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.”

“He lifted his brows. "If I really thought it was the absolute best thing for our kids, you'd have had a battle on your hands. That was just a debate.""With chair-throwing.""Heated debate. Fights involve chair-breaking. Chair-throwing is just getting your attention.”

“The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.”

“Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.”

“The way I see it right now, the United States of America has destroyed itself, or is destroying itself from within, thus making it vulnerable to being conquered from without. The UnitedStates of America is corrupt, as it has no rule of law, and little or no prudential regulation and supervision. The Global Financial Crisis, make no mistake about it, is a global Depression even worse, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and was caused by the same thing – rampant corruption, and it will result in the same thing – World War.”

“I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.”