When a terrorist attack comes, you will not necessarily know who did it. What you can know is that certain kinds of leaders will use that to suspend your rights.

It is aspiring tyrants who say that 'civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.' Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.

Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.

Democracy only has substance if there's the rule of law. That is, if people believe that the votes are going to be counted, and they are counted. If they believe that there's a judiciary out there that will make sense of things if there's some challenge. If there isn't rule of law, people will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote.