A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.

A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

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

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

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

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.