Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

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

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.

I'm a political scientist and I study these things, and I know that economic problems, with the rising unemployment and inflation and low productivity and so forth, were a factor in that election, in that defeat of President Carter.

Power ... is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end.