In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.

Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.

We attempted to try to solve every problem in the world, out of a sense of moral obligations, and attitudes, and our history. But no country can solve every problem without exhausting itself. Therefore, we have to establish priorities.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.