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We're At A Moment When The International System Is In A Period Of Change Like We Haven't Seen For Several Hundred Years. In Some Parts Of The World, The Nation State, On Which The Existing International System Was Based, Is Either Giving Up Its Traditional Aspects, Like In Europe, Or As In The Middle East, Where It Was Never Really Fully Established, It Is No Longer The Defining Element. So In Those Two Parts Of The World, There Is Tremendous Adjustment In Traditional Concepts.

-Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger

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We're At A Moment When The International System Is In A Period Of Change Like We Haven't Seen For Several Hundred Years. In Some Parts Of The World, The Nation State, On Which The Existing International System Was Based, Is Either Giving Up Its Traditional Aspects, Like In Europe, Or As In The Middle East, Where It Was Never Really Fully Established, It Is No Longer The Defining Element. So In Those Two Parts Of The World, There Is Tremendous Adjustment In Traditional Concepts.

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In 10 Years, There Will Be No More Israel.

There Is No Realism Without An Element Of Idealism.

Our Concern For Human Rights Comes To The Fore When There Are Gross Violations Of Human Decencies. Then Other Countries, Including China, Must Recognize That This Affects The American Attitude Towards Their Country. But Towards What Precise Institutions Will It Evolve? I Think We Ought To Leave Something To History.

We Fought A Military War; Our Opponents Fought A Political One. We Sought Physical Attrition; Our Opponents Aimed For Our Psychological Exhaustion. In The Process We Lost Sight Of One Of The Cardinal Maxims Of Guerrilla War: The Guerrilla Wins If He Does Not Lose. The Conventional Army Loses If It Does Not Win. The North Vietnamese Used Their Armed Forces The Way A Bull-fighter Uses His Cape To Keep Us Lunging In Areas Of Marginal Political Importance.

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Now We Have A Whole Series Of Problems - Energy, Environment, Proliferation - Which Go Beyond The Nation. And We Also Know That A Conflict Between Major Powers Would Be A Catastrophe For Which There Is No Compensation In Anything You Can Gain.

In Crises The Most Daring Course Is Often Safest.

Ninety Percent Of The Politicians Give The Other Ten Percent A Bad Reputation.

An Expert Is Someone Who Articulates The Needs Of Those In Power.

It Is An Act Of Insanity And National Humiliation To Have A Law Prohibiting The President From Ordering Assassination.

What Political Leaders Decide, Intelligence Services Tend To Seek To Justify.

Intelligence Services

The History Of Things That Didn't Happen Has Never Been Written.

I Grew Up In Germany During The Nazi Period, And I Came To This Country When I Was 15. And Then I Had To Work In A Factory Because We Had No Resources. And I Went To Night School. So, It Was Not A Rational Ambition For Me To Become A World Statesman.

I Don't Know What Happens In The Next Years. But I Cannot Now Design A Policy In Which We Try To Keep China From Developing, Because In Some Years, If They Develop, They Might Be Rich Enough To Challenge Us, And Adopt The Principle That We Will Hold Down Any State That Might In The Future Become Strong. That Would Make Us A World Empire For Which We Wouldn't Have The Talents Or The Convictions.

Power Is The Ultimate Aphrodisiac.

Any Fact That Needs To Be Disclosed Should Be Put Out Now Or As Quickly As Possible, Because Otherwise The Bleeding Will Not End.

In The Short Term, It Would Not Have Made It Possible To Resume Relations, Because In The Chinese Mind, The Humiliation Of China Started With The Annexation Of Taiwan By Japan. If The United States Had Suddenly Declared Taiwan As A Separate State - For Which We Would Have Had No Support Among Other Nations - The Consequences Would Have Been Giving Up Our Relationship With China And Committing Ourselves To A Long-term Conflict With China.

Even A Paranoid Can Have Enemies.

We Have Three Things In Common: Irish Wives, The Ability To Speak For 17 Minutes Without A Verb, And The Fact That We Both Speak With An Accent.

President Nixon In His Inaugural Address Indicated That He Wanted An Era Of Negotiation. Our Reasoning Was That Whatever Our Ideological Differences, Whatever Our Geopolitical Differences, We Were Condemned To Coexistence By Nuclear Weapons.

The Emigration Of Jews From The Soviet Union Is Not An Objective Of American Foreign Policy. And If They Put Jews Into Gas Chambers In The Soviet Union, It Is Not An American Concern. Maybe A Humanitarian Concern.

In The 1960s, I Would Have Considered China With Its Cpc An Ideologically More Dynamic Country Than The Soviet Union. But The Soviet Union Was Strategically More Threatening.

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Control Oil And You Control Nations; Control Food And You Control The People.

Everybody Who Has Dealt With China Over An Extended Period Of Time Has Come To More Or Less The Same Conclusions. There Are Nuances Of Differences, But Not Fundamental Differences. I Think That President Bush Was Heading In This Direction, And I Have No Doubt That He Will Again Wind Up In This Position. But Right Now He Has To Be Preoccupied With The Atrocity Committed In New York And Washington.

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The Enemies You Make By Taking A Decided Stand Generally Have More Respect For You Than The Friends You Make By Being On The Fence

John Paul Ii Was One Of The Greatest Men Of The Last Century. Perhaps The Greatest.

Administration Has Managed The Extraordinary Feat Of Having, At One And The Same Time, The Worst Relations With Our Allies, The Worst Relations With Our Adversaries, And The Most Serious Upheavals In The Developing World Since The End Of The Second World War.

Realism In Foreign Policy Is Made Up Of A Clear Set Of Values, Since Difficult Foreign Policy Decisions Are Often Decided With The Narrowest Of Majorities. Without Any Sense Of What Is Right And Wrong, One Would Drown In A Flood Of Difficult And Pragmatic Decisions.

The Nice Thing About Being A Celebrity Is That, If You Bore People, They Think It's Their Fault.

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The Emergence Of A Unified Europe Is One Of The Most Revolutionary Events Of Our Time.

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Diplomacy: The Art Of Restraining Power.

In A Diplomatic Negotiation, You Always Meet The Same The Other Side All The Time. Even If You Should Succeed In Outsmarting Him Or In Pressuring Him, It Only Sets Up A Cycle In Which He Will Try To Get Even.

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I Have Always Expressed Respect For Those People Who Make Public Declarations.

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The Essence Of Richard Nixon Is Loneliness.

Transcendentalism

You Should Not Go To War For The Privilege Of Withdrawal. You Need To Define Your Objective And The Outcome, And It Cannot Be The Removal Of One Man.

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I Don't Stand On Protocol. Just Call Me Your Excellency.

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I Think Vladimir Putin Will Give Up Power.

The Absence Of Alternatives Clears The Mind Marvelously.

The Real Distinction Is Between Those Who Adapt Their Purposes To Reality And Those Who Seek To Mold Reality In The Light Of Their Purposes.

A Leader Does Not Deserve The Name Unless He Is Willing Occasionally To Stand Alone.

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What We In America Call Terrorists Are Really Groups Of People That Reject The International System

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Superstars Strive For Approbation; Heroes Walk Alone. Superstars Crave Consensus; Heroes Define Themselves By The Judgment Of A Future They See It As Their Task To Bring About. Superstars Seek Success In A Technique For Eliciting Support; Heroes Pursue Success As The Outgrowth Of Inner Values.

While We Should Never Give Up Our Principles, We Must Also Realize That We Cannot Maintain Our Principles Unless We Survive.

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An Iranian Moderate Is One Who Has Run Out Of Ammunition.

Behind The Slogans Lay An Intellectual Vacuum.

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If I Should Ever Be Captured, I Want No Negotiation - And If I Should Request A Negotiation From Captivity They Should Consider That A Sign Of Duress.

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Every American President, Regardless Of Party, Has Said That America Has An Intense Interest In A Peaceful Resolution. And I Think It Should Be Left At That.

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We First Became Conscious Of The Plane Publicly On A Monday. I Thought Then By The Weekend It Would Be Done. But Then The Chinese Military, The Defense Minister Made A Statement Saying That If There Was No Apology From The United States, The Chinese Military And The Chinese People Would Never Understand. No Reference To The Government Or The Communist Party, And That Obviously Presented An Internal Problem To The Chinese Leadership, Which Was Travelling At That Moment.

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University Politics Are Vicious Precisely Because The Stakes Are So Small.

History Is Not, Of Course, A Cookbook Offering Pretested Recipes. It Teaches By Analogy, Not By Maxims. It Can Illuminate The Consequences Of Actions In Comparable Situations, Yet Each Generation Must Discover For Itself What Situations Are In Fact Comparable.

The Important Thing Is To Do The Right Thing. Then Credibility Will Follow.

Important Things

Today, America Would Be Outraged If U.n. Troops Entered Los Angeles To Restore Order. Tomorrow They Will Be Grateful! This Is Especially True If They Were Told That There Were An Outside Threat From Beyond, Whether Real Or Promulgated, That Threatened Our Very Existence. It Is Then That All Peoples Of The World Will Plead To Deliver Them From This Evil. The One Thing Every Man Fears Is The Unknown. When Presented With This Scenario, Individual Rights Will Be Willingly Relinquished For The Guarantee Of Their Well-being Granted To Them By The World Government

I Do Not Know What Will Happen In China Politically. I Do Know That It Is Impossible To Maintain The Communist System Or Probably Even A Strict One-party System When The Economy Becomes So Pluralistic. Now, What Form That Takes And What Institutions Will Evolve, I Do Not Have A Clear View About. I Do Not Think The United States, As A General Principle, Ought To Intervene In This.

We Are Not Just Any Nation.

A Diamond Is A Chunk Of Coal That Is Made Good Under Pressure.

Iraq Has To Be Made An International, And Not Just A National American Problem.

People Are Generally Amazed That I Would Take An Interest In Any Form That Would Require Me To Stop Talking For Three Hours.

The Art Of Good Foreign Policy Is To Understand And To Take Into Consideration The Values Of A Society, To Realize Them At The Outer Limit Of The Possible.

You're 18 Points Down [in The Polls]... You Might As Well Do What's Right.

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No One Will Ever Win The Battle Of The Sexes; There's Too Much Fraternizing With The Enemy.

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[nixon] Wants A Massive Bombing Campaign In Cambodia. He Doesn't Want To Hear Anything About It. It's An Order, To Be Done. Anything That Flies On Anything That Moves.

The American Formal Position Has Been That We Oppose Violence By Governments Against Their People. That Principle Should Not Be Abandoned.

Why Should We Flagellate Ourselves For What The Cambodians Did To Each Other?

They [american Forces] Are There As An Expression Of The American National Interest To Prevent The Iranian Combination Of Imperialism And Fundamentalist Ideology From Dominating A Region On Which The Energy Supplies Of The Industrial Democracies Depend.

Military Men Are Just Dumb, Stupid Animals To Be Used As Pawns In Foreign Policy.

I Have Great Respect For The Taiwanese. They Have Done An Extraordinary Job. But It Was Not A Sustainable Position To Say That The Legitimate Government Of China Resides In Taiwan, Which At That Time Didn't Have Much Contact With The Mainland.

We Attempted To Try To Solve Every Problem In The World, Out Of A Sense Of Moral Obligations, And Attitudes, And Our History. But No Country Can Solve Every Problem Without Exhausting Itself. Therefore, We Have To Establish Priorities.

Like Any Developing Country, It Has An Inequality Of Wealth. In The Chinese Case, It Is Particularly [pronounced] By The Fact That They Decided They Couldn't Make The Whole Country Move Forward Simultaneously, So They've Started Region By Region. So The Interior Regions Are Much Less Well Off Than The Coastal Regions. And This Is Certainly A Huge Challenge, Because It Produces A Flow Of Populations From The Poorer Regions To The Richer Regions.

It Is Not Often That Nations Learn From The Past Even Rarer That They Draw The Correct Conclusions From It. For The Lessons Of Historical Experience, As Of Personal Experience, Are Contingent. They Teach The Consequences Of Certain Actions, But They Cannot Force A Recognition Of Comparable Situations.

It Is, After All, The Responsibility Of The Expert To Operate The Familiar And That Of The Leader To Transcend It.

[the New World Order] Cannot Happen Without U.s. Participation, As We Are The Most Significant Single Component. Yes, There Will Be A New World Order, And It Will Force The United States To Change It's Perceptions.

World Government

Competing Pressures Tempt One To Believe That An Issue Deferred Is A Problem Avoided; More Often It Is A Crisis Invited.

The Reason Prophets Are So Rarely Honored In Their Own Country Is That Their Role Is To Transcend The Limits Of Their Contemporaries' Experience And Imagination. They Achieve Recognition Only When Their Vision Has Been Turned Into Experience - In Short, When It Is Too Late To Benefit From Their Foresight.

No Country Can Act Wisely Simultaneously In Every Part Of The Globe At Every Moment Of Time.

Well It Did Not Make Excessive Sense To Say That 20 Million People Are The Recognized Government Of A Billion People That Have Their Own Institutions. We Did Not Change It In The Sense That We Said This Has To End, But There Was A U.n. Vote That Transferred The Legitimacy Of China From Taiwan To Beijing. Beijing Was Recognized As The Government Of All Of China. Then, Under President Carter, We Followed What The U.n. Had Already Done Eight Years Earlier.

Realism In Foreign Policy Means Careful Consideration Of All Aspects Pertinent To The Issue, Before Taking A Decision. This Is The Only Way You Can Move From Where You Are To Someplace Else.

Americans Believe That You Can Alter People By Conversion, And That Everybody In The World Is A Potential American. The Chinese Also Believe That Their Values Are Universal, But They Do Not Believe That You Can Convert To Becoming A Chinese Unless You Are Born Into It.

You Can't Make War In The Middle East Without Egypt And You Can't Make Peace Without Syria.

History Is The Memory Of States.

We Are Used To Dealing With Problems That Have A Solution And That Can Be Solved In A Finite Period. But We're At The Beginning Of A Long Period Of Adjustment That Does Not Have A Clear-cut Terminal Point, And In Which Our Wisdom And Sophistication And Understanding Has To Be One Of The Key Elements.

It Is Frankly A Mistake Of Amateurs To Believe You Can Gain The Upper Hand In A Diplomatic Negotiation.

The China Of The 1970s Was A Communist Dictatorship. The China Of The Twenty-first Century Is A One-party State Without A Firm Ideological Foundation, More Similar To Mexico Under The Pri Than Russia Under Stalin. But The Measurement Of The Political And The Economic Evolution Has Not Yet Been Completed, And Is One Of The Weak Points Of The System.

Our Nation Is Uniquely Endowed To Play A Creative And Decisive Role In The New Order Which Is Taking Form Around Us.

A Return To The 1967 Lines And The Abandonment Of The Settlements Near Jerusalem Would Be Such A Psychological Trauma For Israel As To Endanger Its Survival.

I Think An Appeal To American Idealism And Willingness To Sacrifice Would Be An Important Contribution, Because What Is Happening Now In Many Countries, Not Yet In The United States, But In Many European Countries, It's The Inability Of Government To Ask For Sacrifices Of Its People.

I Would Say The Special Experience Of American Wartime Policy In The Last 40 Years, From Vietnam On, Is That The War Itself Became Controversial In The Country And That The Most Important Thing We Need In The Current Situation Is, Whatever Disagreements There May Be On Tactics, That The Legitimacy Of The War Itself Does Not Become A Subject Of Controversy. We Have To Start With The Assumption, Obviously, That Whatever Administration Is Conducting A War Wants To End It.

I Think China Will Do Nothing To Obstruct It, And They Probably Will Go Along With It.

U.s. Policy Toward The Third World Should Be One Of Depopulation

Every Civilization That Has Ever Existed Has Ultimately Collapsed.

The Gorbachev Period Is Conceived As An Abandonment Of Historic Russian Positions. So This Is The Framework, In My View, In Which Putin Operates.

I Do Not Criticize People Who Take A Public Stand On Human Rights Issues. I Express My Respect For Them. But Some People Are More Influential Without A Public Confrontation.

It Is Steady, Reliable, Tough. It Never Yields To Panic. It Is Never Defeated One-sidedly. It Achieves Everything Attainable By Character And Tenacity.

A Bluff Taken Seriously Is More Useful Than A Serious Threat Interpreted As A Bluff.

If It's Going To Come Out Eventually, Better Have It Come Out Immediately.

In His Essay, ‘perpetual Peace,’ The Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, Argued That Perpetual Peace Would Eventually Come To The World In One Of Two Ways, By Human Insight Or By Conflicts And Catastrophes Of A Magnitude That Left Humanity No Other Choice. We Are At Such A Juncture.

No, [the U.s.] Has Made It Clear That We Consider A Peaceful Resolution An Essential Aspect Of American Foreign Policy. This I Believe To Be A Situation Understood By China, But Again, It Is Important To Not Sound Too Truculent. Taking On A Billion-plus Chinese Is Not An Enterprise Which One Should Enter Lightly.

Donald Rumsfeld Is The Most Ruthless Man I Have Ever Met? And I Mean That As A Compliment.

There Are Some People Who Think That At Some Time In The Future, China May Challenge Us For Supremacy In The Pacific, And Therefore, What Do We Do Today To Prevent That? And You, Of Course, Will Say That We Will Try To Thwart Any Economic Progress In China. If We Engaged In Such A Policy, We Would Turn A Billion-plus People Into Nationalist Opponents Of The United States.

It Is Not A Matter Of What Is True That Counts, But A Matter Of What Is Perceived To Be True.

I Don't Read Books, I Write Them.

This Country Cannot Afford To Tear Itself Apart On A Partisan Basis On Issues So Vital To Our National Security.

In The Middle '50s, I Had Written That The Point Would Come, Inevitably, At Which The Relationship Between The Cause Of Conflict And Political Objectives Would Be Lost.

Obama Is Like A Chess Player Who Is Playing Simultaneous Chess And Has Opened His Game With An Unusual Opening.

People Think Responsibility Is Hard To Bear. It's Not. I Think That Sometimes It Is The Absence Of Responsibility That Is Harder To Bear. You Have A Great Feeling Of Impotence.

Intellectuals Are Cynical And Cynics Have Never Built A Cathedral.

Nafta Is A Major Stepping Stone To The New World Order.

Access To Natural Resources Can Become A Question Of Survival For Many States.

90% Of Politicians Give The Other 10% A Bad Name.

We Must Learn To Distinguish Morality From Moralizing.

Most High Officials Leave Office With The Perceptions And Insights With Which They Entered.

Intellectual Capital

Baseball Is The Most Intellectual Game Because Most Of The Action Goes On In Your Head.

For The West, The Demonization Of Vladimir Putin Is Not A Policy; It Is An Alibi For The Absence Of One. Putin Is A Serious Strategist – On The Premises Of Russian History. Understanding Us Values And Psychology Are Not His Strong Suits. Nor Has Understanding Russian History And Psychology Been A Strong Point Among Us Policymakers.’

Jews Were Segregated From 1933 On. We Could Only Play Against Other Jewish Teams. This Wasn't Just Social Segregation; This Was The Beginning Of The Extermination Of The Jews. That's Why My Family Left Germany In 1938.

America Has No Permanent Friends Or Enemies, Only Interests.

One Has To Remember That Every Progress That Has Been Made Towards Peace In The Middle East Has Come Under American Leadership.

Before The Freedom Of Information Act, I Used To Say At Meetings "the Illegal We Do Immediately. The Unconstitutional Takes A Little Longer." [...] But Since The Freedom Of Information Act, I'm Afraid To Say Things Like That.

Whatever Must Happen Ultimately Should Happen Immediately.

History Knows No Resting Places And No Plateaus

The Capacity To Admire Others Is Not My Most Fully Developed Trait.

Our Greatest Foreign Policy Problem Is Our Divisions At Home. Our Greatest Foreign Policy Need Is National Cohesion And A Return To The Awareness That In Foreign Policy We Are All Engaged In A Common National Endeavor.

The Conventional Army Loses If It Does Not Win. The Guerrilla Wins If He Does Not Lose.

Accept Everything About Yourself - I Mean Everything, You Are You And That Is The Beginning And The End - No Apologies, No Regrets.

Every Success Is Usually An Admission Ticket To A New Set Of Decisions.

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I Don't Have A Brief For Every Single Reaction Of Israel, But I Think It Is Important That The Political Negotiations Occur Free Of The Threat Of Terrorism.

Nothing Is More Urgent Than A Serious, Dare I Say Compassionate, Debate As To Where We Are Going At Home And Abroad. Technicians Cannot Master Revolutions; Every Great Achievement Was An Idea Before It Became A Reality. Cathedrals Cannot Be Built By Those Who Are Paralyzed By Doubt Or Consumed By Cynicism. If A Society Loses The Capacity For Great Conception, It Can Be Administered But Not Governed.

Now When I Bore People At A Party They Think It's Their Fault.

The American Foreign Policy Trauma Of The Sixties And Seventies Was Caused By Applying Valid Principles To Unsuitable Conditions.

China Had Never Had To Deal In A World Of Countries Of Approximately Equal Strength, And So To Adjust To Such A World, Is In Itself A Profound Challenge To China, Which Now Has Fourteen Countries On Its Borders, Some Of Which Are Small, But Can Project Their Nationality Into China, Some Of Which Are Large, And Historically Significant, So That Any Attempt By Chinese To Dominate The World, Would Involve In A Disastrous For The Peace Of The World.

I Think That His [obama's] Task Will Be To Develop An Overall Strategy For America In This Period, When Really A New World Order Can Be Created.

If You Control The Food, You Control A Nation. If You Control The Energy, You Control A Region. If You Control The Money, You Control The World.

Many Of The Scientists Have Believed That Their Contribution To Ending The Nuclear Race Is Not To Let Any New Weapons To Be Developed.

Committees Are Consumers And Sometimes Sterilizers Of Ideas, Rarely Creators Of Them.

Before There Was The Soviet Union That Could Inflame Matters. Now You Have States Not As Powerful As The Soviet Union, But States Like Iraq, Like Iran, And To Some Extent Syria, Having Made It Possible For Some Of These Groups To Operate. So It Is A Very Difficult Situation.

What China Would Do, I Cannot Predict. China Has All But Given Up The Claim To The Use Of Force, Except In The Circumstance Of Taiwan Declaring Its Independence. That Is A Huge Step Forward Over What The Situation Was Many Years Ago.

Even Paranoid People Have Enemies.

Henceforth The Adequacy Of Any Military Establishment Will Be Tested By Its Ability To Preserve The Peace.

I Don't See Why We Need To Stand By And Watch A Country Go Communist Due To The Irresponsibility Of Its Own People.

If You Mean By "military Victory" An Iraqi Government That Can Be Established And Whose Writ Runs Across The Whole Country, That Gets The Civil War Under Control And Sectarian Violence Under Control In A Time Period That The Political Processes Of The Democracies Will Support, I Don't Believe That Is Possible.

The British Capitalize On Their Accent When They Don't Want You To Know What They're Saying. But If You Wake Them Up At 4 A.m., They Speak Perfect English, The Same As We Do.

The Members Of The Islamic Staye Have Cut The Throat Of An American On Television. This Is An Insult To The United States, Which Requires That We Demonstrate That This Is Not An Act That Is Free. I Would Strongly Favor A Strong Attack On Isis For A Period That Is Related To The Murder Of The American.

I Also Do Not Believe That The United States Can Let Itself Be Driven Into A Political Role By Escalating Terrorism, And Therefore, The Leaders Of The Arab World And Arafat Should Do Their Utmost To Put An End To This And Then The United States Should Do Its Utmost To Produce A Political Solution.

What Is Applicable Is To Understand That First Of All China Has Undergone A Huge Revolution In The Last Years. Anyone Who Saw China As I Did In 1971 - And For That Matter Even In 1979, Because Not Much Had Changed Between 1971 And 1979 - And Sees China Today, Knows One Is In A Different Economic System.

Some Of The Critics Viewed Vietnam As A Morality Play In Which The Wicked Must Be Punished Before The Final Curtain And Where Any Attempt To Salvage Self-respect From The Outcome Compounded The Wrong. I Viewed It As A Genuine Tragedy. No One Had A Monopoly On Anguish.

We Have To Be Careful In Negotiating With Iran That We Don't Create The Impression Among The Arab States And The Sunni States That We Are Working On A Condominium Between Iran And The United States, Because That Will Panic Them And Drive Them Into Making Their Own Arrangement.

The Western Concept Of Democracy Is Based On The Idea That The Loser Of An Election Has The Possibility Next Time Round Of Being The Winner. But In The Case Of An Ethnically Or Religiously Divided Country, In Which Minorities Don't Live Peacefully Together, This Necessary Balance Can't Be Properly Guaranteed By Democracy. When Each Ethnic Group Arms Itself, It Is Not Surprising That The Army Of A New State Is Viewed By Part Of The Population As An Ideological Militia.

The Russian Empire Under Czars And Commissars Has Been Hard To Deal With For Other Countries.

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