Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.

The Chinese military budget today is officially listed as, I think, about $15 billion. But even if you double it, that's only a tenth of ours. So the possibility of China challenging the United States for the next ten years over the Pacific is next to zero. There could be a conflict between us and China over Taiwan, but I think that, too, will not occur with the proper policies on both sides.

Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.

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

This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.

The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

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.