“But the average Kabuli was prepared to sacrifice some liberty for greater security and a measure of dignity. That's what the Taliban promised. It's only afterwards that they went off the rails. It's when they went too far that they became unpopular, held in contempt.”

“Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable.”

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”

“What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?”

“That's what love is. It's some power greater than you and me, that draws us to one special person”

“The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails.”