High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

You can almost see voters nodding their heads at home: The public's faith in politicians and political institutions has been on a steep and dangerous decline for decades, because elected leaders fail to deliver.

The UAWK is a mass-based political organization of our socialist agricultural workers which was founded and has developed under the wise guidance of the great leaders, and a reliable transmission belt and peripheral organization of the Party.

I wasn't a very convenient person for the leadership. I had my own opinion about things and knew how to insist on this.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.