Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

We are used to dealing with problems that have a solution and that can be solved in a finite period. But we're at the beginning of a long period of adjustment that does not have a clear-cut terminal point, and in which our wisdom and sophistication and understanding has to be one of the key elements.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.