If you asked somebody 'what do you wish for in life?' they wouldn't say 'happiness.' I would have answered 'excitement knowledge ' God knows - I mean many many different things but certainly not 'happiness'. It seemed like a foreign concept to wish for something that specific and that singular.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

Urban America has been redlined. Government has not offered tax incentives for investment as it has in a dozen foreign markets. Banks have redlined it. Industries have moved out they've redlined it. Clearly to break up the redlining process there must be incentives to green-line with hedges against risk.

Power must be used but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should inform our approach to every challenge from reforming state government to engaging in foreign affairs.

I am often asked if when I was secretary I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.

We have a government that borrows $4 billion a day. We have a government that owes trillions of dollars in debt half of that to foreigners most of that to Chinese investors. I don't - that is extreme. Not only is it extreme. It's insane and it's unsustainable.

Whatever it is that the government does sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are like God's infinite mercy a last resort.

I'm not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.

China has been committed to the independent foreign policy of peace and has developed friendship and cooperation with all countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Our soldiers have nobly fought to protect freedom since our country's birth and have fought to protect those that could not protect themselves even in foreign lands when called upon.

You the foreign media have been the companion of my people in its long and painful journey to freedom.

The condition every art requires is not so much freedom from restriction as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

America is becoming more and more dependent upon imports from foreign manufacturers than we are exports from our country in all fields: in appliances in clothing even food. This year America may become for the first time in its history a net food importer.

Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and foreigners. We are very proud of that.

Let us build a 21st-century rural economy of cutting-edge companies and technologies that lead us to energy and food security. Such an investment will revitalize rural America re-establish our moral leadership on climate security and eliminate our addiction to foreign oil.

I have always said there is only one thing that can bring our nation down - our dependence on foreign countries for food and energy. Agriculture is the backbone of our economy.

Europe is difficult to coordinate and our main deficit may not even lie in this area of finance and economics but in foreign and security policy. We have a leadership problem because we are still 27 different members who have still not decided on how to work with each other based on what we used to call a European constitution.

There is the fear common to all English-only speakers that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise you know why not just come out and say it?