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When you launch a surgical operation, you must already be well deployed to follow it through with larger forces. That complicates matters: you need to be ready for a full-fledged campaign on the operational level and have the diplomatic backing lined up as well.

A surgeon will cut off a limb in order to protect the body from disease. And a commander-in-chief should pull out of a war that cannot be won in order to protect a nation.

I do know that detachment is important. A surgeon can't be weeping into the open wound.

Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works.

The president said that this is not removing a mole. You know, removing a mole, that's an outpatient sort of an operation. This was removing a cancer, removing a cancer takes more time.

Committing unnecessary surgeries is very, very rare. And it's very wrong.

I don't like surgery. I don't like elective surgery, I don't like surgery that you have to have.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.