The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.

It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.