“He was in way over his head... We're held accountable for our stupidity & moral ignorance... Arrogant condescension...suffering from self-hatred which comes along with a terrible nostalgia for the way we imagine things were, the nostalgia of defeat...breeds tyrants... He can hold his liquor, I'll give him that. It's a generational skill,...indicative of a pathology.”

“We grew up in places like Georgetown and Alexandria and Chevy Chase; we were flown in great thumping silver Pan American airplanes all the way to Rome, all the way to Greece, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Hamra, Cairo; we went to American Community Schools; we spent weekends swimming at the American Club.”

“The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever.”

“Ivy League bumblers and drunks who had once pulled the levers of secret gov't in an age of high anxiety...These were the bastards who beat the bastards, unless it was all just dumb luck.”

“...and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible heartrending sobs.”

“...he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”