Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest - sometimes with extensive borrowing - when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

I think there are worse things than war. For example, injustice.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.

The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

Whoever trains the children controls the future. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a society will only ever be as strong as the families in it.

Somewhere along the length of time, while we are busy numbering our days, we forget to make them count.

We don’t read the Bible, the Bible reads us.

All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.

How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.

A man's looks are measured by the depth of his pockets.

Coming to grips with the reality that our planet is not the only one harboring intelligent life the universe.

I mean, I guess you could say I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.