I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.

The period of Prohibition - called the noble experiment - brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.