If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

From a geo-strategic point of view, I consider Iran a bigger problem than the Islamic State. ISIS is a group of adventurers with a very aggressive ideology. But they have to conquer more and more territory before they can became a geo-strategic, permanent reality. I think a conflict with ISIS - important as it is - is more manageable than a confrontation with Iran.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.

The Russian people, at least the ones I know, have pride in being a Russian. And, therefore, they want to be taken seriously in international affairs.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

This is awful. Do it again.