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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.
You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
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.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.