21 Quotes by Elaine Sciolino

In 1991, only two years into the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice suddenly left her powerful job as the top Russia expert on the National Security Council and went back to California - to get a life.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

France has become the second-largest consumer of pizza per person, per pound, in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Italy.

I guess the biggest surprise I got going to Iran was that the Iranians really liked me as an American.

The position of vice president does not exist in France; neither does a role comparable that of the first lady of the United States.

Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.

Every day since the start of the Tour de France, the popular 'Le Parisien' newspaper has published a story about a book written with the bicycle in mind.

Francois Hollande, the president of France, and Segolene Royal, a senior cabinet minister who once ran for that post herself, have an exceptionally complicated relationship. The two lived together for 25 years, raising four children over that time.

Historically, the French have had a romantic attachment to their bikes. Though the first functioning two-wheeler is thought to have been invented by a German in 1817, it was the French who popularized and marketed the device in the 1860s, giving it the name 'bicycle.'