One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.

Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.