To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

History is the memory of States.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.