Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.

I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, a misjudgment about the nature of the communist system and the unity of the communist world and the degree to which the experience of Europe could be repeated in Vietnam.

A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

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

Even paranoid people have enemies.

I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.