No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.
A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if it does not lose.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.
The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.
I don't ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.
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.
