“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.”

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.

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

The problem with human beings is that they can’t sit alone in a room for more than an hour.

Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

We can’t rely – or no country can rely on just a single personality to carry it forward. And so what the American founding fathers understood was that institutions were built for human imperfection not human perfection.

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man–the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.