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.

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

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

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

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

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

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

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

Caution others, only if your cautioning does not hurt them. If it does, then do not caution them.

Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.

Ahh, love, why is it so easy to let you in, but so difficult to let you out? Why couldn’t you subsist only two-sided?

God gives every bird its food but he does not throw it into the nest.

There's no success story. Everybody's got a ghetto story. You always want to make it bigger than what it is.

I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.

We need to do more than just what is right. We need to join together and right what is wrong.

Also, when on a campaign to convince a stranger that you aren't a few fries short of a Happy Meal, throwing around phrases like "tangentially Swedish" is not the best way to go.

The real meaning of a poem is to stop time.

I acted in millions of TV shows.