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.

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

I do consider myself a feminist. I know the word has weird implications for people now, but I do think that its important to have women involved, whether its business or public service or...anything.

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.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

This is pure speculation, but for a period of time, a lot of getting into a party was through fundraising and volunteer work, and Republican women had more time to do that than democratic women, who were out there getting jobs.

I think that we had a different view of what the 21st century could be like, with much more of a sense, from our perspective, of trying to have an interdependent world: looking at solving regional conflicts, having strength in alliances, operating within some kind of a sense that we were part of the international community and not outside of it.