We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.
The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.
Now when I bore people at a party they think it’s their fault.
Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.
People think responsibility is hard to bear. It’s not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.
What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.
The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.
The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.
Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.
History is the memory of States.
Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.
This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.
Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it’s a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.
In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other.
Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.
We are all the President’s men.
Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.