Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?

We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

...there is an optimal balance, depending on the manner of man's life, between the density of human population and the tolerances of nature. This balance, in the case of the United States would seem to me to have been surpassed when the American population reached, at a very maximum, two hundred million people, and perhaps a good deal less.

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all.

A political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.

War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.