It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling - and indeed healthy - to ask why you have been given so much.

Democracy is the most realistic way for diverse peoples to resolve their differences, and share power, and heal social divisions without violence or repression.

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 think my father thought I might be president of the United States. I think he would've been satisfied with secretary of state. I'm a foreign policy person and to have a chance to serve my country as the nation's chief diplomat at a time of peril and consequence, that was enough.

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

We're all products of our environment, and I suspect that strength of will - the feeling, "I'm going to be able to do whatever you put in front of me" - is honed in an environment where not everything is easy. Ironically, growing up in that environment, you don't have a sense of aggrievement or entitlement. You just have a sense of overcoming.

I stick to playing Brahms, but I love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I've also been a big fan of Earth Wind and Fire since the Seventies and of The Gap Band since the Eighties.