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" Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home. "

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" Yes, Europe needs to be more welcoming, but that's only half of it. Muslims need to embrace the obligations of European residence and citizenship. "

" CIA officers aren't idiots. They knew they were heading into deep water - legally and morally - when they signed up for the interrogation program. That's part of the agency's ethos - doing the hard jobs that other departments prudently avoid. "

" Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies. "

" Sometimes good countries are so traumatized by events that they lose their bearings and embrace bad leaders. "

" As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around. "

" Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism. "

" Training a reliable military force that adheres to Western norms and standards is the work of a generation, not a few months. "

" Moscow and Washington have evolved a delicate process for 'de-confliction' in the tight Syrian airspace, where accidents or miscommunication could be disastrous. "

" The European Union needs to reinvent its security system. It needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information, enforcing borders and protecting citizens. "

" Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency. "

" Machiavelli did believe that it was better to appear to be good than to be good. If you're good, you're just too vulnerable, but if you appear to be good, you get all the benefits plus you can be sneaky and, when necessary, stab someone in the back. "

" As Obama prepares to begin the last year of his presidency, he stands in an unusual position on the national stage: He is the rationalist, a creature of intellect rather than emotion. "

" Prominent scientists have become increasingly convinced that the connection between carbon emissions and rising temperatures is real, but skeptics have whole truckloads of studies to demonstrate the opposite. "

" If you want to hear arguments against deploying a big U.S. ground force in Syria, just ask a general. "

" It's a genuine dilemma for governments, deciding how much information to share in this threat-filled era. "

" I've tried, in 'Bloodmoney,' to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have. "

" The nation's chronic weakness is its political system, which is nearing dysfunction. If the U.S. can elect better political leadership, it should be able to manage problems better than most competitors. "

" Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy. "

" European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army. "

" This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset. "

" Real security will come when it's a moneymaker for private companies who want to satisfy public demand for an Internet that isn't crawling with bugs. "

" Empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. "

" Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States. "

" The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction. "

" Politicians need to rethink their reflexive invocations of the Second Amendment and the idea that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge. "

" Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan. "

" The surest way to empower the new terrorist gangs would be to withdraw from U.S. diplomatic missions. "

" Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts. "

" The American experiment has always depended on a measure of tolerance and good sense. "

" The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going. "