Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.

We should set goals within the limits of our resources while working to the limits of our powers.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

If some of my judgments were wrong - and some were wrong - they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation.

I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.

We are committed to cleaning up the air and cleaning up the water. But we also are committed to a strong economy, and we are not going to allow the environmental issue to be used sometimes falsely and sometimes in a demagogic way basically to destroy the system-the industrial system that made this the great country it is.

Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain -if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.