Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities. There are other reasons, but this is a significant one.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire - this time under the Shia label.

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

I have not endorsed Trump and will not do so.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.