The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.

What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.

I'm a big advocate of drones.

No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.

I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.

I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.

Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'

One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.

Necessity is a mother.

Also, somehow, there doesn't seem to be any old-fashioned gender roles in place, or any gender roles at all. The priest who condemned me to the mob was a woman. I'll cheer for equality later.

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm.

Is this true or only clever?

To focus means to bring your attention to the center, to concentrate on one thing intently in order to gain clarity.

Once you lose somebody so close to you, you become very overprotective.

Let go the things of which you are in doubt for the things in which there is no doubt.

Men who are devoid of the power of spiritual perception are unable to recognize anything that cannot be seen externally.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.