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This is the very devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.

We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.

With foreign officials come foreign merchants, and with foreign merchants come foreign soldiers. They will usurp our authority and influence to begin with, and in the course of time, our guests will have become our hosts.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

We have come a long way in terms of foreign policy.

No person can be more deeply sensible than myself of the danger of entangling alliances with any foreign nation. That we should avoid such alliances has become a maxim of our policy consecrated by the most venerated names which adorn our history and sanctioned by the unanimous voice of the American people.

It is my view that we cannot conduct foreign policy at the extremes.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.