“If we Americans are to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the war on terror after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we have failed to make our case to the great moderate mass of peace-loving people at the heart of the Muslim world, we need to listen to Greg Mortenson. I did, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”

“Together, the two began the kind of conversation that flows seamlessly, unstoppably, each fork begetting another branch of common interest, a conversation that continues until this day.”

“For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones”

“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”

“Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.”

“It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.”

“We have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined, “Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”