China is in its own category - too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.

I went to college somewhere between the invention of the iPad and the discovery of fire... but I had gone to a women's college.

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.

Armageddon is not a foreign policy.

Nobody's ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.

John Kerry knows more about more subjects than an awful lot of people. But I think it's a very hard job [Secretary of State].

For somebody who loves foreign policy, being Secretary is the best job in the world - but it doesn't happen twice.