Once fear enters your life - it will take you in one of two directions: empowerment or panic.
Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.
In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.
Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.
I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 911. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.
A peace deal requires agreements, and you don't make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies.
World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.
Don't measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions. If you're not prepared to change your diet or your workouts, don't get on the scale.
The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.
The best proof of the high quality of American beef is the continued negative BSE findings supported by the highest surveillance possible. The administration should be working to increase our surveillance of BSE, not scaling it back.