The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must.

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.

The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.