My favorite quote is Thomas Jefferson`s "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." Well, he was a slave-owner. But these institutions, while they weren't perfect at the time, did allow people to prosper and to continue to struggle and build toward them. That's what you need, is good institutions and I think people will eventually live up to them.

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

You will make a difference in the world, but not immediately. Your first obligation is to find something you like doing, because if you like doing it, you'll do it well.

Everywhere that I go in the world, people desperately look to American leadership in all of their world's most difficult problems. You can look at any region of the world and the United States is still the country to which those regions look for leadership.

I laugh almost everyday. I have a good sense of humor, so I'm always finding something funny.

U.S. officials never expected that 'we were going to open garages and find' weapons of mass destruction.