For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.

You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

There are some people who think that at some time in the future, China may challenge us for supremacy in the Pacific, and therefore, what do we do today to prevent that? And you, of course, will say that we will try to thwart any economic progress in China. If we engaged in such a policy, we would turn a billion-plus people into nationalist opponents of the United States.

The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

The challenge is whether China as a rising country, the United States as the superpower, can develop a cooperative relationship in this period before nationalism becomes so dominant in China as a substitute for communism, and a kind of self-righteous isolationism in this country that substitutes China for the Soviet Union.