One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household.

This is a big world. Billions – rapidly increasing billions – of people live outside our borders. Obviously, a great number of them, being much poorer than they think most of us are, look enviously over those borders and would like, if they could, to come here.

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgiveableness.

A guest of one’s time and not a member of the household.

You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.

Russia, Russia-unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit.

Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one’s secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?

The general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union,

It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.

The United States cannot reshape other countries in its own image and that, with a few exceptions, its efforts to police the world are neither in its interests nor within the scope of its resources. This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable.