I think there's no question that a nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability to the region, because nuclear weapons are weapons of peace. They're weapons of deterrence.

NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia.

Crimea, a casualty of the West's attempt to march NATO and the European Union up to Russia's doorstep, is surely lost for good.

The U.S., over the course of the 1990s and the first decade-and-a-half of the 2000s, went to great places to make China more and more economically powerful. We, in fact, have created a potential peer competitor. This is remarkably foolish.

The central aim of American foreign policy has traditionally been to dominate the western hemisphere while not permitting another great power to dominate Europe or Northeast Asia. The United States has not wanted a peer competitor.

Survival should be the number one goal, states can have all sorts of goals that are deeply immoral or unethical. But that doesn't mean they're irrational.

I think everybody has different priorities in their life. People live their lives differently. People become famous through all sorts of different reasons... some of it through art and some of it through just wanting to be famous. And I think how that all starts tends to reflect how you live your life daily.

Mime is in our daily life and with little effort, we can all perfect the art form.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

The dull routine of our daily job takes on a new significance, assumes a beauty and importance undreamt of before, if we consider it from the angle of service to God.

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.