Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.
Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
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.
Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.
Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.
The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.
It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.
The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.
I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.
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.
I think that his [Obama's] task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a New World Order can be created.
I wouldn't say it's a split. It's a difference of emphasis. It does exist between, I would say, the State Department and the Defense Department.
We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.
If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.
The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.
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 Russian people, at least the ones I know, have pride in being a Russian. And, therefore, they want to be taken seriously in international affairs.
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 convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.
It is steady, reliable, tough. It never yields to panic. It is never defeated one-sidedly. It achieves everything attainable by character and tenacity.
The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.
I don't have a brief for every single reaction of Israel, but I think it is important that the political negotiations occur free of the threat of terrorism.
You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
Where position is felt to be a birthright, generosity is possible (though not guaranteed); flexibility is not inhibited by a commitment to perpetual success.
A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.
Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.
I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.
[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.
You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.
Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?
A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.
The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
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.
Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.
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.
He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.
Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.
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.
We cannot give Russia veto over deployment of forces on NATO territory. But we have to understand their particular sensitivities, and, therefore, there should be a dialogue on these issues.
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.