The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.

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.

I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.

Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.

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

The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.