“Later I learned to improve my forecasting—if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon.”

It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.

Politicians are like dogs, Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable

in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.

There can’t be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.

The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.

A country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.

Who controls the money controls the world.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.

Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again.

I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again.

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

Learning is hard. Unlearning is harder. Pretending that most of us don’t need to do either when it comes to racism is its own form of violence.

The greatest investment a young person can make is in their own education, in their own mind. Because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. But what you learn once stays with you forever.

Everyone you meet knows something you don’t know but need to know. Learn from them.

Love hurts. There is nothing as painful as heartbreak. But in order to learn to love again you must learn to trust again.