If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

In diplomacy, clear-cut wins and losses are rare.

Real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing.

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

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

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

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.