“I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”

It’s a pity both sides can’t lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year.

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it’s their fault.

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.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.

I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

Home is you, me and, the road with books for life.