“Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year.”

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.

It’s a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter, but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.

If I’m not the love of your life I’ll be your greatest loss instead.

Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.

Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.

The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.