We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions.

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred

It was not malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.

I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity

The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.