The phrase "it's better to be lucky than good" must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.

The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

A moral foreign policy means your positions on certain matters are clear no matter what, and that you won't forget about them when it's convenient.

Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one

One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies

Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights

One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren't forced to choose between malice and incompetence.

I’m a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment.