I had said from the start that I thought Iraq was a mistake, that we should have stayed focused on Afghanistan. I think it was the right decision because the Taliban at that point had gotten a lot of momentum before I'd gotten into office, partly because we hadn't been paying attention as much as we needed to to Afghanistan.
Civil society people - these are the people - civil society groups are the people who need to monitor the aid to ensure that the aid is directed to what it is supposed to. And in order for them to do so, they need to have the space, they need to have the freedom, and they need to have the right to demonstrate, and to petition their government. They can't do that in Ethiopia; they can't do that in Eritrea; and so this is why I was cautioning that we may be repeating some of our old mistakes.
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.
By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.
Is enjoyment the goal of life? Were it so, it would be a tremendous mistake to become a man at all. What man can enjoy a meal with more gusto than the dog or the cat ? Go to a menagerie and see the [wild animals] tearing the flesh from the bone. Go back and become a bird! . . . What a mistake then to become a man! Vain have been my years - hundreds of years - of struggle only to become the man of sense-enjoyments.
[About his marijuana use] I did. It's not something that I'm proud of. It was a mistake as a young man, but you know? I mean not going to -- I never understood that line. The point was to inhale. That was the point.
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting "Glory to God," but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way. We are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are OUR altars and not God's.