For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.

90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.

In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.

Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.

The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.

Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.