The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.

The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.

Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.

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.

We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.