I've never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.

I never dreamed about one day becoming Secretary of State. It's not that I was modest; it's just that I had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt.

I don't actually believe in a clash of civilizations. I believe in a clash of the civilized and the noncivilized.

In terms intellectually, [what] shaped my life was the whole Munich thing [the Munich Agreement] that I knew about all my life, in terms of how large powers make decisions that affect small countries, and the unintended consequences of that. The other part is I knew about the Holocaust. l just didn't know that it applied to my family. But that did affect the way I thought about what I was seeing as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; there's no question about that.

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Every new president inherits headaches, but President Obama has inherited an entire emergency room.

As a child, I really did see buildings bombed, and what makes me different from an American that's the same age as I am is that I can understand what happens when there is fighting in a way that they couldn't.