“I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.”

“She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.”

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”

“Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God”

“I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.”

“The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.”