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.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

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.

At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.

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.

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