“Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.”

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

Yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.

It has the added advantage of being true.

Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty posturing.

Every victory is only the price of admission to a more difficult problem

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

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

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies.

For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God

History is the memory of States.

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.

When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.

Government, in it’s last analysis, is organized force.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

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

The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.

For many people, the pope is still, to a certain extent, a positive role model and a moral force, although others feel that this aspect has suffered greatly.

I’ve been terrified of the water, and yet it seems I’m forced to go into in on every movie that I make.

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.