Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

We first became conscious of the plane publicly on a Monday. I thought then by the weekend it would be done. But then the Chinese military, the defense minister made a statement saying that if there was no apology from the United States, the Chinese military and the Chinese people would never understand. No reference to the government or the Communist Party, and that obviously presented an internal problem to the Chinese leadership, which was travelling at that moment.

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.

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

I don't read books, I write them.

Our problem was that in the American approach to Soviet affairs policy has oscillated between people who take an essentially psychological approach and people who take an essentially theological approach, and the two really meet. The psychologists try to "understand" the Soviet Union. And try to ease its alleged fears. The theologians say the Soviets are evil.