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.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
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.
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
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.
It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.