The magic of America is that we're a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

I got married three days after graduation, and the first thing I did what I was expected to do which was to work on a small newspaper. So we were in Chicago where my husband worked for the Chicago Sun-Times and we were having dinner with his editor and he said 'So what are you 'gonna do honey?' and I said 'I'm going to work on a newspaper', and he said 'I don't think so", because Newspaper Guild regulations said that I couldn't work on the same newspaper as my husband.

As strong as the United States is, we can't deal with terrorism alone.

I have very set and consistent principles, but I am flexible on tactics. I like to get the job done.

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.

I don't think people should think of women's issues as auxiliary issues - they are central.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.