It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

Overseas, America's fighting men and women have been waging war against those who would attack America and plunge the world into a period of darkness, and their success can easily be seen.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world, and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by any supposed national interest.

I think that Americans - and this is not true just now, but over the years - are not fundamentally opposed to war. They're fundamentally opposed to losing wars.