If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.

Personal abuse is no substitute for policy. It signals panic.

I cannot imagine how any diplomat, or any dramatist, could improve on (Ronald Reagan's) words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit: 'Let me tell you why it is we distrust you.' Those words are candid and tough and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust.

I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within.

One of my favourite quotations is: 'That which thy father bequeathed thee, earn it anew, if thou wouldst possess it.'

Fear is not the basis for foreign policy.

First you win the argument, then you win the vote.