I went to a girls high school and I went to a women's college and when I first started teaching at Georgetown it had been a single sex school and so they wanted to have some women professors when they went co-ed, and so I originally was hired to start a program there, and really encourage women to go into foreign policy. I always have done that, and I really do think that things are better when women are involved.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

The capability of negotiating... is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

There's nobody who's had a resume like [Hillary Clinton] that's run for president.

Don't make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I'm not.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

I think we all are people that are the product of our backgrounds. It's wrong to think that you're not.