“The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.”

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

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.

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

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.

Every nation has a moral obligation to safeguard the future.

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

I don’t think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.

You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children