I Think Its Important For One To

Twenty Or Thirty Years Ago, In The Army, We Had A Lot Of Obscure Adventures, And Years Later We Tell Them At Parties, And Suddenly We Realize That Those Two Very Difficult Years Of Our Lives Have Become Lumped Together Into A Few Episodes That Have Lodged In Our Memory In A Standardized Form, And Are Always Told In A Standardized Way, In The Same Words. But In Fact That Lump Of Memories Has Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Our Experience Of Those Two Years In The Army And What It Has Made Of Us.

A Human Action Becomes Genuinely Important When It Springs From The Soil Of A Clearsighted Awareness Of The Temporality And The Ephemerality Of Everything Human. It Is Only This Awareness That Can Breathe Any Greatness Into An Action.

I Really Do Inhabit A System In Which Words Are Capable Of Shaking The Entire Structure Of Government, Where Words Can Prove Mightier Than 10 Military Divisions.

Our Country, If That Is What We Want, Can Now Permanently Radiate Love, Understanding, The Power Of The Spirit And Of Ideas. It Is Precisely This Glow That We Can Offer As Our Specific Contribution To International Politics.

Hope Is Definitely Not The Same Thing As Optimism. It Is Not The Conviction That Something Will Turn Out Well, But The Certainty That Something Makes Sense, Regardless Of How It Turns Out.