Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.

In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.

Well it did not make excessive sense to say that 20 million people are the recognized government of a billion people that have their own institutions. We did not change it in the sense that we said this has to end, but there was a U.N. vote that transferred the legitimacy of China from Taiwan to Beijing. Beijing was recognized as the government of all of China. Then, under President Carter, we followed what the U.N. had already done eight years earlier.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.