Biographie

[observation, February 2017] Democratic civilization has turned out to be even more fragile than we imagined; the resources of civil society have turned out to be even deeper than we knew. The battle between these two shaping forces - between the axman assaulting the old growth and the still firm soil and the deep roots that support the tree of liberty - will now shape the future of us all.

[on Ulysses S. Grant] Grant drank in a very American way - not like the sociable, southern-European kind of drinking, or even the clubbable, competitive drinking of the nineteenth-century British Army. This was hard-edged, solitary drunkenness in search of oblivion.