In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.

It takes more than one dove to make peace in the Middle East.

One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

We have the most generous immigration policy, but what is a concern is when illegal immigrants come and undermine a variety of the systems that work in order to make our society function.

It's one thing to be religious, but it's another thing to make religion your policy.

After the Cold War, to rally the American people to understand that we had to be a part of solutions. It's one thing to say that we have to run everything, it's another to say we don't want anything to do with it.

I never dreamed about one day becoming Secretary of State. It's not that I was modest; it's just that I had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt.