Great Throughts Treasury

"The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age."

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name."

"The average person thinks that morality can be applied as directly to the conduct of states to each other as it can to human relations. That is not always the case, because sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils."

"When one is on a tightrope, the most dangerous course is to stop."

"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 great feeling of impotence."

"Diplomacy: the art of restraining power."

"Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries"

"A catastrophic outcome in Iraq would affect directly or indirectly all members of the (NATO) alliance as well as countries from South East Asia to the northern hemisphere,"

"A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security."

"A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure."

"A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if it does not lose."

"A review of withdrawal strategy ... seems in order."

"A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival."

"A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood."

"A little uncertainty is good for everything."

"A statesman?s duty is to bridge the gap between his vision and his nation's experience. If his vision gets too far out ahead of his nation's experience, he will lose his mandate. But if he hews too close to the conventional, he will lose control over events."

"Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets."

"A symbol of integrity, courage and of high quality."

"America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests."

"American abdication in Iraq will have global consequences if a fundamentalist radical state were to emerge in Baghdad."

"Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end."

"An occasion to blow off their frustrations on an issue on which they didn't look as if they are begging (the United States) for help."

"Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western? This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique."

"At a moment when the international situation and the United Nations are in a stage of extraordinary transition."

"At the end of that (peace) process, a Palestinian state was always inevitable... What other attribute could the territory that would be left to the Palestinians have?"

"Art is man's expression of his joy in labor."

"Because of the axiom that guerrillas win if they do not lose, stalemate is unacceptable... the military challenge in Iraq is more elusive."

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

"But we cannot begin with an exit without having first defined what the objective is."

"Can you imagine what Nixon would have been like had somebody loved him? He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him."

"Congress can't do much more damage to us than they already have. To this extent we're liberated to do what is right... Our successors will be living in a nightmare if we don't do what is right."

"Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited."

"Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad."

"Clearly, security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship."

"Deep versed in books and shallow in himself."

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

"Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met? and I mean that as a compliment."

"Even a paranoid can have enemies."

"Drawing Sunni leaders into the political process is an important part of an anti-insurgent strategy. Failing that, the process of building security forces may become the prelude to a civil war,"

"Even a paranoid has some real enemies."

"Each group has what amounts to its own geographically concentrated militia ... Is it then possible to speak of a national army at all?"

"Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves. These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4, 1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me."

"For Confidential Eyes Only... feed over 6,000 enemy soldiers for a full year at the full ration."

"Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed."

"For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made, ... Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

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

"He's between Israel on one side, Iraq and Syria on the other, ... He knows that the Palestinians have tried to overthrow him on a number of occasions, so he has to navigate with extraordinary delicacy."

"I believe -- and certainly from everything I've been told about him -- that he's an honorable enough man so that he will carry out his assignment with ability and with care."

"History knows no resting place and no plateaus."

"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."