Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.

The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

Like any developing country, it has an inequality of wealth. In the Chinese case, it is particularly [pronounced] by the fact that they decided they couldn't make the whole country move forward simultaneously, so they've started region by region. So the interior regions are much less well off than the coastal regions. And this is certainly a huge challenge, because it produces a flow of populations from the poorer regions to the richer regions.

Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.