“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”

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.

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.

Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.

Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Thus the expert in battle moves the enemy, and is not moved by him.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.