I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person's shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

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

Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.

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

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

The other thing that happened was that we have a tendency to project our own weaknesses onto another woman. I don't think men do that particularly.

And so I have studied, I have to tell you, revolutions and uprisings for a long time. They are all slightly different, but what they all look for is some kind of a mechanism to go from an authoritarian system to an open, democratic system.