“...he was telling me that our [country's] blood-soaked and atrocity-littered past was important but that the future didn't have to be its slave.”

“It's what we do in our future, that decides how important our past truly was.”

“We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”

“Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.”

“Ideas define us, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future.”

“He didn't use me like an object, because a thing didn't need to be mastered. He didn't use me like a slave, because a slave didn't need to feel wanted. He used me like a woman, hungry and desperate.”