Elaine Sciolino Quotes

For President Bush, the first, the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, I spent all 4 years of his presidency on the staff for the National Security Council.

I was working at a phone company. I got tired of my life and wanted to change it, so I did.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.

I don't know Condoleezza Rice personally. I'm sure she's a nice lady, and I'm sure she plays the piano well. But she was a very bad National Security Adviser. The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates.

U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.

We must effectively counter Moscow's attempts at influence with American strength and resolve, certainly not with a weak approach to President Putin or with any relief from sanctions.

In my view, Russia has not been a particularly collaborative player on the world stage.

I love my career. I thought, if I was lucky, I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so - new chapter.

I think nothing I've done has impacted my life as much as working on 'Treme,' because it was the first project that I worked on in the United States after being an actor in the Netherlands my whole life, basically.

I don't think Mr. Putin has our best interests at heart.

In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and '70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support.

I was obsessed with the idea of going to college. And I took many years off after that, so I sort of missed the weird, crazy transition that was what making movies was in the nineties to what's happening now.

The war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

After 9/11, the U.S. seemed vulnerable for the first time in a long time. We were no longer the superpower that no other country could touch. I thought, 'When and how did that dominance begin?'

I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists as well: Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department, and certainly Cheney.

We don't believe that Russia is a direct threat to Norway, but we believe that Russia has become more unpredictable in its policies.

I loved every minute of my time at Microsoft, but I had always envisioned having another phase of life just because I thought that would be interesting. It had never been my plan to work until I literally didn't want to do anything and then hang it up.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

In the scale of American blunders - from the Dred Scott decision to the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s to the tragedy of Vietnam - is the Trump presidency really unique?

For a few years, I thought I was putting show business behind me. I was busy doing other things in life, particularly with politics. I was not out looking for films, really. I lost interest.

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Mitt Romney had it right in 2012 when he told President Barack Obama that Russia was 'without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.'

I was a policy office in my final tour in the Navy, a Russian policy officer, and we were always thinking about our interactions and how they would affect the country 10, 20 years from now.