“Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)?”

Don’t be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.

If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.

The issues are too important to be left for the voters.

A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.

I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.

A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

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.

You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.

I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.

We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.

I don’t only like rock music. There are other forms of music that I find interesting. I would want to do everything, every kind of music. I wouldn’t want to be limited to like playing heavy metal or whatever.

People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

It is a rare and beautiful thing when we choose to offer love in situations when most people would choose to scorn or ignore.

A broken heart that chooses love one more time. – strength.

I believe that for the most part, achieving success – whatever that is for you – is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult.