Based on all criteria - military power, economic influence, cultural dominance - America remains number one, even though other, new players are increasingly challenging it in that role.

When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.

Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find - and there will be plenty.

Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong.

The thing that I would say is that U.S. power is not eternal. I am not saying that it won't come to an end. Because it will.

I believe it is still true that conflicts among major powers usually stem from geopolitical rivalries but rarely from economic competition.

If a caterpillar doesn't know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand each other less and less.

I left Russia in 1993 optimistic that democracy had taken hold despite the obstacles.

Power engenders the evil-minded who ill-treat the needy in all parts of the world.

...a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Kashmir, the 86, 000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.

It's easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she's never been anything but dead, than to miss her at all the places where she was alive.

When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.

I have a right to voice my opinion, but you know - when you can't really make choices, it really don't matter.