I read War and Peace from cover to cover last summer, and what I found remarkable was how Tolstoy was able to bring his own philosophy of life into t… - Bob Kerrey

When I was, say, fifteen years old in 1958, I could have gone and talked to a veteran of World War I or World War II and said, 'Tell me your story.' They could have taught us with these men who had experience in war, instead of giving us a dry history book. I think that to understand history, to be excited by history, a human being needs something. You need the capacity to feel sympathy for the people you're reading about in the story.

I don't think we prepare young people very well to make the tough decisions. The thing we do with children- and it was done when I was raised- is we remove them from the adults when the adults are making decisions, and so we don't show them that adults make bad decisions. And that's what you have to figure out in life. You have to figure out how to make good decisions. You're going to make good ones, and you're going to make bad ones, and they get tough. The toughest ones are the ones that come very quick and that are connected to ethics.

I think for the most part they're ordinary guys who did an extraordinary thing and most of us recognize that, you know, there but for the grace of God goes somebody else. And most of them feel that they received it for others and that their own actions were not especially heroic.