The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.
I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
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 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.
Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.
A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.
No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
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.
I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.
We are moving towards a world that is reordering itself and that may appear more ordered at some periods of time, but I see no sign that we are moving towards a world order in my definition of it - namely, a system which is accepted, which is internalized by the majority of the key participants.
Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.
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.
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
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 is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
There is obviously a gap between the public's perception of the role of U.S. foreign policy and the elite's perception.
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.
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.
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
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 great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
Ninety percent of all politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.
