In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it..

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power..

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 ….

Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness tha….

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless..

I also do not believe that the United States can let itself be driven into a political role by escalating terrorism, and therefore, the leaders of th….

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon..

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know ex….

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been..

I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, ….

Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the sy….

I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in t….

I think Vladimir Putin will give up power..

No, [the U.S.] has made it clear that we consider a peaceful resolution an essential aspect of American foreign policy. This I believe to be a situat….

Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can m….

The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives..

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. I….

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..

You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the C….

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….

I do not know what will happen in China politically. I do know that it is impossible to maintain the communist system or probably even a strict one-p….