The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.

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.

...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.

The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.

Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters.

Actually, the inability of any society to resist immigration, the inability to find other solutions to the problem of employment at the lower, more physical, and menial levels of the economic process, is a serious weakness, and possibly even a fatal one, in any national society. The fully healthy society would find ways to meet those needs out of its own resources.