While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.

In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.