The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

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 Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score.

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.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Even paranoid people have enemies.