Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system.

You're 18 points down [in the polls]... You might as well do what's right.

The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.