The American tradition of foreign policy exceptionalism, our grand strategy as a nation, reaches back much further. Really at the turn - the end of the 19th century, when we achieved power a generation after the Civil War, the outlines of an American vision came into focus, and what we - it was based on two things. One, our realization that our values and our interests were the same, and that our business interests would advance as our values advanced in the world.

America's sanctions policy remains intact, and it will remain intact until it changes, if it does, and I'm not sure it will.

The sense the great democracies of the world - Europe, the United States, Japan, others - are going to set the agenda for the world. [Russians] want to bring that down.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.

[Russians] want to bring us down to make them feel better about the failure of the Soviet Union. I don`t mean bring us down as in collapse, but bring us down a notch in a big way.

The usual practice is that the people in their jobs keep their jobs until their successors are named. Now, that`s the way the [George] Bush administration treated the [Bill] Clinton people. And that`s the way the [Barack] Obama administration treated the [George W.] Bush people.

Partisanship is not part of my professional makeup.