Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And I think the only way you're going to improve US foreign policy and set a sound course for the future is if you're willing to look back at what went wrong before.
Yet another reason to be angry at President Trump: He is forcing me - and every other American who is not a racist - to defend the most left-wing members of Congress.
History has been my primary intellectual passion ever since, as a boy in Southern California, I began reading books on World War II and the life of Winston Churchill.
The spread of communications technologies - social media, TV news channels - aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.
Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender - and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.
Stupidity is not an accusation that could be hurled against such prominent early Republicans as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes.
Upon closer examination, it's obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism.
Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it's a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe.
The John F. Kennedy presidency, with its glittering court of Camelot, cemented the impression that it was the Democrats who represented the thinking men and women of America.
Joining the Grand Old Party seemed like a natural choice for someone like me who fled the Soviet Union as a boy and came to Los Angeles with his mother and grandmother in 1976.
You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.
Joe Biden stands out from other Democratic candidates not just by taking on President Trump directly but also by seeking to separate Trump from the rest of the Republican Party.
We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.
Diplomatic eminences often natter on about preventive action, making the obvious point that it's better to cure festering ills before they metastasize into something much worse.
France has had socialist presidents on and off since the 1920s, and it remains a free country. Socialists have ruled in many South American countries without ushering in disaster.
I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.
I have not given up my faith in democracy - it remains the worst form of government except for all the others - but I have given up my youthful expectation that it would inevitably triumph.
I yearn for intellectual sustenance on vacation but want, of course, to avoid tedium or boredom. I want to read something that will entertain me but also help me appreciate what I am seeing.
Logic, fact, morality, legality, ideology: All of it is irrelevant in understanding the Party of Trump. Republicans have made crystal clear that nothing matters to them other than partisanship.
What's true for New York is true for most of the country: We are a long way removed from the double-digit interest rates and unemployment rates, and the soaring crime rates, of the early 1980s.
The United States has been locked in an escalating confrontation with Iran ever since President Trump decided to pull out of the nuclear deal in 2018 and to impose unilateral sanctions in 2019.
I am certain that my family - my grandmother, mother and myself - had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn't have any money.
Everyone from Silesians to Sicilians to Scots seems to want autonomy or independence. The British voted to leave the European Union, and hostility to the superstate is rising across the continent.
I used to be one of those people who read thrillers on vacation, but for some reason most thrillers no longer thrill me. Maybe because these days reality is far more unbelievable than any fiction?
My mother and I were alike in one crucial respect: We may have been Russian by birth, but we were English in spirit. She was intensely reserved and private, and seldom showed what she was feeling.
There is little doubt that our society is changing rapidly, but one thing will never change as long as we remain a democracy: the need for voters to know the essentials of our history and government.
Thirty years on, I am no longer as certain about anything as I was at age 20. I now regret my support for the war in Iraq and kick myself for the naive expectation that freedom was destined to prevail.
All acts of terrorism - all killings of the innocent - are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs.
The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over - and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right.
There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I'm one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.
Freedom will not prevail because of historical forces; it will only win, if it does, because of historical actors. In other words, us. Those like me who came of age around 1989 used to take democracy for granted.
I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.
As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.
Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.
Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be vulnerable in ways that are difficult to imagine.
The ur-conservatives of the 1950s - William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest - were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
When Democrats aren't being fiscally reckless, they are economically irresponsible. Democrats bemoan corporate greed and have not a positive word to say about the entrepreneurs that have made our economy the envy of the world.
Mexico attacked United States troops in 1846 because they had moved into disputed border territory; President James Polk used this as a convenient casus belli, but he was preparing a war message for Congress even before the attack.
There is a small group of 'Never Trump' conservatives. But it is a small group, and I've actually been surprised that there are not more of us. There's enough of us for a dinner party, not a political party. I wish there were more.
Neoconservatism' once had a real meaning - back in the 1970s. But the label has now become meaningless. With many of those who are described as neocons, including me, fleeing the Trumpified right, the term's sell-by date has passed.
You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket - I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage - but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, as many as 60,000 people were executed in Europe as suspected witches. But it would be nice to think that centuries of advances in science and education have made people less prey to phantasms and falsehoods.
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.
Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of.
The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, has not so far provoked the kind of anguished debate that accompanied the 50th anniversary. The lack of controversy is fitting because there wasn't much soul-searching at the time.
Anyone anywhere - as long as you live in a country that does not censor the Internet - can now read this newspaper. But like diners passing up a healthy salad for an artery-clogging cheeseburger, many information consumers are instead digesting junk news.
My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.
For years, as a seller of real estate and star of reality TV, Donald Trump made a living wooing customers and viewers. His selling skills were good enough that he even convinced voters to elect him as president in spite of his near-total lack of qualifications.
Well, a general danger of punditry is that there's very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you.
In some ways the most appalling thing of all, that Trump continues to question the fact of a very serious Russian attack on the core of our political system. I mean, I don't know how you get more reckless and dangerous than that. And you know, the president's first obligation is to defend the country. And in this respect, he doesn't seem to be interested in doing that.