“Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world”

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.

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.

The biggest surprise to me is many members in Congress don’t actually work.

Why do so many Christians pray such tiny prayers when their God is so big?

When a big play occurs for our team, I’m concentrating on how the defense is reacting to it.

When I moved to New York, I started switching fragrances. Between different seasons I would change fragrance, or if I was going out for a big fancy night versus going out in the daytime. But I also found that I was changing and growing so much.

I’ve never been a big fan of gossip. Being a victim of it, I knew how much it hurt.

I’ve never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn’t have a price tag on the other side.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful.

My feet ain’t got nothing to do with my nickname, but when folks get it in their heads that a feller’s got big feet, soon the feet start looking big.