The United States will remain the most powerful nation on Earth for the next 10, 15 years, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered.

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it’s a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.

It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Politics is compromise.

It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.

In the modern age where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.