My mind-set is Munich. Most of my generation's is Vietnam.

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.

I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary.

I am by nature a worried optimist.

If we have to use force, it is because we are America.

I had more problems with the men in our own government, and not because they were male chauvinistic pigs but because they had known me for so long. I might have been a carpool mother and a friend of their wife, and so they'd been to my house for dinner and things like and they thought 'how did she get to be secretary of state when I should be secretary of state?' So that was more of a problem.

We have to understand where we have strategic relationships that require us to take a different approach. I guess the easiest way to describe it is: different strokes for different folks.