Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Danner

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Mark Danner.

Last updated on April 17, 2025.

Mark David Danner is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written books and articles on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East, as well as on American politics, covering every presidential election since 2000. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

American - Writer | Born: November 10, 1958

Source: Wikipedia

One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them.

Mark Danner

I would not like to be in President Obama's position in making choices on Afghanistan.

Mark Danner

What is evil? What is - where does the evil come from that lies behind someone like Saddam Hussein, or Radovan Karadzic, or General Claude Raymond in Haiti. As I say, I've tended to find these people - I mean, Saddam, I've never met or interviewed - but these other people to be rather disappointing. Their political goals were mundane. What they had working for them was opportunism, was very often cleverness and was ruthlessness.

Mark Danner

Torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral.

Mark Danner

I think that the first point to be made is there is no "solution" in Afghanistan. Solution I put in quotes. We live in an op-ed culture, which is to say, you always need to have a solution. The last third of that op-ed piece needs to say, "Do this, this, this and this." There is no this, this, this, and this, that will make Afghanistan right.

Mark Danner

I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty - is a pretty good candidate.

Mark Danner

How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world.

Mark Danner

The problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about.

Mark Danner

Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Danner

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