Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered.

The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.

Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.

The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.

Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus