Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony. A Russian state was created around Kiev about 1,200 years ago. Ukraine itself has been part of Russia for 500 years, and I would say most Russians consider it part of Russian patrimony. The ideal solution would be to have a Ukraine like Finland or Austria that can be a bridge between these two rather than an outpost.

In the short term, it would not have made it possible to resume relations, because in the Chinese mind, the humiliation of China started with the annexation of Taiwan by Japan. If the United States had suddenly declared Taiwan as a separate state - for which we would have had no support among other nations - the consequences would have been giving up our relationship with China and committing ourselves to a long-term conflict with China.