 Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets. |
| The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. |
| The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples. |
| If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent. |
| The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. |
| The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself. |
| High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make. |
| I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves. |
| If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere. |
| There can't be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. |
| A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone. |
| No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. |
| The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. |
| It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise. |
| It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it. |
| No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none. |
| 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. |
