Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.