It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to borrow money from the Chinese to go give to another country for humanitarian aid. We ought to get the Chinese to take care of the people.

When you're smaller and leaner, you're not going to have that large a presence throughout the world.

Rising sea levels, severe draughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

Go forward, knowing that you are greater than the challenges of your time.

You know, as director of the CIA, I got an awful lot of intelligence about all the horrible things that could go on across the world.

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

Rather than undermining the Palestinian Authority, it is in Israel's interests to strengthen it by... continuing to transfer Palestinian tax revenues and pursuing other avenues of cooperation.

One demonstration of extremists, any more than a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in the United States, is not necessarily reflective of what the rest of the country feels.

The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack.

The White House was so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.

The United States has to be a leader in the world, because the problem is: If we are not leading, nobody else will.

Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.

Leadership demands that we make tough choices.

I couldn't think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow's leaders.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

You only know that you're smart because you're around dumb people from time to time!

The act of tattooing one's skin was a tranformative declaration of power, an announcment to the world: I am in control of my own flesh.

Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.

It's easier to create money than to spend it.

A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.