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

With respect to the relationship between nuclear weapons and the advent of détente, one has to consider two things. One, the nature of nuclear weapons in themselves, and secondly, the advent of nuclear parity.

History is the memory of States.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

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

One of the hardest things for the president is to distinguish the routine issues that come through from the essential issues that affect the long term, and not to let himself get sucked into the battles of the bureaucracy for marginal issues, and to keep them focused and to keep his mind clear on what the fundamental things are that he has to accomplish.

When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.