If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.

The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.

The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.

I don't stand on protocol. Just call me your Excellency.

I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.

In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.

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.