"Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11. If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary."

“I believe in Canadians. I believe in you. As I said at the beginning, we are a serious people.”

“The understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.”

“The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible political goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence...”

“Moral globalisation is best understood not as a tide of convergence in which we are swept together into a single modernity, but instead as a site of struggle over whether, and to what extent, the cash nexus can be made to serve moral imperatives of equity and justice and which civilisational model – Chinese, American, or some other rival’s – will define the order of the twenty-first century.”

“We are living a moment of truth in Iraq, a moment in which we have to look fair and square at disagreeable realities, in which we have to look at ourselves. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison are a kind of mirror in which we have to look at ourselves and ask: what kind of people did this? How did this become possible? Could I have done a thing like this to those people?”

“Some voices are calling on America to circle the wagons. Some are even saying that our enemies do worse, so we should respond in kind. The problem here is that this is America. This is a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and equal respect for all persons. We can’t pretend that we can bend the rules any which way.”