Scott Anderson Quotations

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.

So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy, the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew.

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books.

As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity.

If wells are constructed right and operated right, hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem. … Our natural gas supplies would plummet precipitously without hydraulic fracturing.

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

What the Fed is really trying to say is that it doesn't know what it is going to do next. And if the markets abhor anything, it is uncertainty. Expect bond and stock market volatility to increase from here until the inflation outlook solidifies.

Pain is always preferable to numbness.