The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

One thing worse than an America that is too strong, the world will learn, is an America that is too weak.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

The world needs a strong America.

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cure for AIDS in the marketplace before Magic Johnson gets AIDS?

Oh Wasn't it naughty of Smudges? Oh, Mummy, I'm sick with disgust. She threww me in front of the judges, And my silly old collar-bone's bust.

Don't accept the old order. Get rid of it.

I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.

I think that’s a mercy of this island, actually, that it won’t give us our terrible memories for long, but let us keep the good ones for as long as we want them.

Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realising you were the prisoner!

Being in the presence of the "other" seems to show me who I am in a way that is really important to me. I feel radically more comfortable in Laos, say, than I do in Pennsylvania.

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.

I think that the older you get, the more you become your true, essential self. You find the things that make you happy. You whittle away the parts of yourself that mean less to you.