But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You’re looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.

I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America. But it doesn’t mean I won’t run.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

The authority you establish must emerge naturally from your character, from the particular strengths you possess.

All very successful commanders are prima donnas and must be so treated.

Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.

Aviation offered such fun as crossing the continent in planes large and small, trying the whirling rotors of an autogiro, making record flights. With these activities came opportunity to know women everywhere who shared my conviction that there is so much women can do in the modern world and should be permitted to do irrespective of their sex.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game – if I put everything into the fight business – then I would eventually run the fight business.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

No woman in my time will be prime minister or chancellor or foreign secretary – not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be prime minister; you have to give yourself 100 percent.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

What Washington needs is adult supervision.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, ‚If you don’t know how to make the right decision, you’re not a director.‘

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

Women feel empowered when they can do the things that are supposed to be only for men, you know? It breaks boundaries, it’s liberating, and it’s empowering when you feel like, ‚Well, I can do that, too.‘

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.

You want me to own a team and deal with these rich, spoiled stubborn athletes, and try to get them to perform? No thank you.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

A good model of how to ‚work with the enemy‘ internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

All good leaders are connectors. They relate well and make people feel confident about themselves and their leader.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

I’m always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty.

The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

One man with courage is a majority.

I just think it is important that you realize, that you’re the best in the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you’re libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

One of the key qualities a leader must possess is the ability to detach from the chaos, mayhem, and emotions in a situation and make good, clear decisions based on what is actually happening.

I can make more generals, but horses cost money.

I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

No other country in the world does what we do. On every issue, the world turns to us, not simply because of the size of our economy or our military might – but because of the ideals we stand for, and the burdens we bear to advance them.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.