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

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.

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.

Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

Every genius I have met could be classified as crazy by most people. They possess the highest level of sanity that us people find difficult to understand and accept.

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

I’m not a genius. I’m just a hard-working guy.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.