If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.

Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.

It's an improvisation on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you don't know how to get there. It's not linear.

A world without the United Nations or with a paralyzed United Nations would be far more costly to all of us and far more dangerous to peace and stability.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it.