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

Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.