Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It’s an admission that one grows in life.
You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.
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.
In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence.
We attempted to try to solve every problem in the world, out of a sense of moral obligations, and attitudes, and our history. But no country can solve every problem without exhausting itself. Therefore, we have to establish priorities.
It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It is therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.
Taiwan will probably not declare independence. The question isn’t independence. The issue is whether Taiwan will declare itself as a sovereign separate state. That will start a huge crisis if that happens.
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can’t stand.
The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.