Great Throughts Treasury

"People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours."

"So he shamed me."

"One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality."

"Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room."

"The essence of this man [Richard M. Nixon] is loneliness."

"Syria was too weak to fight Israel alone, ... He saw that if it didn't join the international system in some manner, it would fall hopelessly behind. His motive was entirely practical."

"The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry."

"The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions."

"The gravest in the Atlantic alliance since it was formed."

"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

"The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence"

"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."

"The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait."

"The Chinese have run their system for 3,000 years without advice from the U.S. They don't like to be lectured by a country only 200 years old."

"The guerrilla wins if he does not lose."

"The history of things that didn't happen has never been written."

"The Indians are master-psychologists. They know they have to deal with us because they are literally now in worse shape than ever."

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

"The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself."

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault."

"The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live...In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threaten China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would involve in a disastrous for the peace of the world."

"The president is trying to head out in a direction that avoids civil war in Iraq, and that prevents the insurgents from dominating and establishing some sort of fundamentalist regime."

"The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes."

"The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples."

"The president has said publicly, and he has told me privately, that he has every intention to carry out the recommendations of the commission,"

"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. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room."

"The Shah (of Iran) was - despite the travesties of retroactive myth - a dedicated reformer."

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

"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it."

"The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it."

"There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane. Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do."

"The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power."

"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."

"They (weapons) can become a shield by which to step up terrorist actions,"

"There's nothing more we can do about (the accidental bombing)."

"There is nothing we are doing with the Soviet Union that you do not know."

"To argue that a collapse of the US in Iraq would not have consequences is simply living in a dream world."

"They want us to accept the desirability of destroying China's nuclear capability."

"Those who believe that confrontation with China can be a national strategy... do not understand the dynamics of the current and foreseeable international system,"

"To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal."

"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will pledge with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will willingly be relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government."

"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it."

"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

"University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East."

"We are all the President's men."

"We cannot always assure the future of our friends. We have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are."

"We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape ? to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance."

"We are here because cooperative relations with China are in the American national interest. Every president for 30 years has come to that conclusion, and a rejection of this agreement would be a vote for an adversarial relationship with the most populous nation of China."

"We have overcomplicated the issue... The United States has been attacked on its territory with thousands of casualties. All the United States is saying it cannot tolerate weapons of mass destruction in that region."

"We had a very interesting and positive discussion, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with several of the key staff members of the governor's staff... A few weeks ago I stood with the governor when I spoke about present events and nuclear strategy, and my impression is we share very compatible views."