“The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.”

The war is just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just. The will is therefore the principle element that must be considered, not the means, He who intends to kill the guilty sometimes faultlessly shed the blood of the innocents

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

In short, the end justifies the means.

Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial.

Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.

Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world

Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.

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.

The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Americans have a tendency to believe that when there’s a problem there must be a solution.

For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. Inevitably,

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

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.