Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It — Mark Riebling

"A Moral Reckoning is, among its other faults, a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners. Reading it is like listening for three days to Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe."

"There was, sometimes, a de facto alliance between this president and pope. But relations were not so close that they could be taken for granted by the presidents men. In fact, the documents reveal a continuous scurrying to shore up Vatican support for U.S. policies."

"I think that in the emergency situations like we have with potentially weapons of mass destruction, the agent in the field needs as much flexibility as he can and the decision of probable cause as to what’s going to occur needs to be made not in headquarters and not by the attorney general and not by a special court in Washington, but by the agent in the field who needs to respond immediately."

"Riebling’s analysis has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the intelligence situation."

"If [an FBI agent] abuses his power, we should punish him, and there are laws on the books for that. But just because a power can be abused doesn’t mean you take away the power. Congress can declare war unjustly. What do we do if they do so? Do we take away their power to declare war? No. We somehow reprimand Congress. We vote them out of office. If a senior official or a field agent leaks some personal information on someone, they should go to jail, and they will."

"Winston Churchill led the life that many men would love to live. He survived 50 gunfights and drank 20,000 bottles of champagne."