Democratic openings that come about in that way - the overthrow of a totalitarian government by external powers - it makes it really hard to make those first steps toward democracy.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.

Our effort to build stability through authoritarians in the Middle East for 60 years had given us neither democracy nor stability.

I think there are plenty of men out there who are capable and accomplished in their own realm. You don't have to be in the same field.

This system, built on free markets, free trade and free peoples and American protection, that's what got us from the end of World War II to the extraordinary events of the end of the Cold War and a system that was one of prosperity and peace for a lot of people, including for the United States.

Most of the people who were responsible for 9/11 are now in custody or have been killed. But there are others, and they plot and they plan, and they hope to pull it off again. And while we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. So there's no way to overreact to that.

I believed Afghanistan was always going to be hard. It's the fifth poorest country in the world. And when you fly over it, you realize that there's not much there. And, of course, it has the problem, too, of being on that border with Pakistan in basically an ungoverned region that has given the terrorists a staging ground. So it's a very difficult place. But I do believe that the mission there can succeed if success is defined as helping the Afghans to prevent the Taliban from being an existential threat to the Afghan government.