University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

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

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.

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

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

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

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.