Quotes by Diplomats - Page 13

We have made our tasks infinitely more difficult because we failed to do yesterday what we are glad to do today. To delay longer will make the war more protracted and increase the sacrifices for victory. Let us stop asking ourselves if it is necessary to do more now. Let us ask ourselves what more we can do today, so we have less to sacrifice tomorrow.
John Gilbert Winant
Ask yourself the question: If I don't do it, who will? If you find the answer is no one will do it, then do it yourself.
Omar Saif Ghobash
Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.
Octavio Paz
On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!
Washington Irving
[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.
Joseph de Maistre
..it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories.
John Adams
The line of head is strong, but the line of heart is weak. And most importantly, the line of life is short. The stars do not seem to be right.
Vikas Swarup
If luck wouldn't find him, he would do his best to make his own.
Michael Punke
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T.E. Lawrence
We have to make these young people (of the Depression) feel that they are necessary. (They should be given) "certain things for which youth craves – the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad netstowards your oceanic eyes.There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,its arms turning like a drowning man's.I send out red signals across your absent eyesthat smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.You keep only darkness, my distant female,from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad netsto that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.The birds of night peck at the first starsthat flash like my soul when I love you.The night gallops on its shadowy mareshedding blue tassels over the land.
Pablo Neruda
I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.
Pablo Neruda
Then the Miller fell off his horse.
Geoffrey Chaucer
You should take a good look at all sides of an issue before making a decision. Put something away in case of an emergency. New neighbors will bring good cheer. A small problem may occur at home base, but you will solve it quickly and correctly. Don’t offer smart advice unless you are really asked to comment.
Vikas Swarup
Knowledge in the head and virtue in the heart, time devoted to study or business, instead of show and pleasure, are the way to be useful and consequently happy.
John Adams
There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history... [T]he detail of the formation of the American governments... may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven... it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses... Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.[A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, 1787]
John Adams
Por que en las epocas oscurasse escribe con tinta invisible?Why in the darkest agesdo they write with invisible ink?
Pablo Neruda
A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.'(Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absur
John Adams
No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my election.
John Quincy Adams
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
This is your life, not someone else's. It is your own feeling of what is important, not what people will say. Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. Some of t hem will attribute to you motives you never dreamed of. Some of them will misinterpret your words and actions, making them completely alien to you. So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
Eleanor Roosevelt
It is a destiny of a woman to suffer in silence.
Vikas Swarup
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Pablo Neruda
Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
Octavio Paz
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.
Dag Hammarskjöld
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
Dag Hammarskjöld
This accidentalmeeting of possibilitiescalls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?And, at once, this Ibecomes unreal.
Dag Hammarskjöld
CHAPTER VIConcerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And AbilityLET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
Niccolò Machiavelli
if people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to behave responsibly.
Carne Ross
An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.
Otto von Bismarck
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
Octavio Paz
So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.Necklace, drunken bellfor your hands smooth as grapes.And I watch my words from a long way off.They are more yours than mine.They climb on my old suffering like ivy.It climbs the same way on damp walls.You are to blame for this cruel sport.They are fleeing from my dark lair.You fill everything, you fill everything.Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,and they are more used to my sadness than you are.Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me.The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.You listen to other voices in my painful voice.Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.But my words become stained with your love.You occupy everything, you occupy everything.I am making them into an endless necklacefor your white hands, smooth as grapes.
Pablo Neruda
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Lajwanti made the cardinal mistake of trying to cross the dividing line that separates the existence of the rich from that of the poor. She made the fatal error of dreaming beyond her means. The bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.
Vikas Swarup
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.
Washington Irving
To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile!
Washington Irving
A wise man travels to discover himself.
James Russell Lowell
I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait
Pablo Neruda
The appreciation of birds, indeed the appreciation of all the phenomena of spring, cannot be dissociated from the accumulations of memory. The appearance of a familiar bird immediately awakens a train of forgotten associations, and this makes each spring transcend its predecessor. The interest accumulates and is compounded. The first yellow-throated warbler next year will be the more meaningful to me as it brings back that moment in the woods opposite Dyke. For one remembers clearly enough the fact of such a moment, but only an evocative sight or sound or smell can bring back the full emotion. The person who sees the bird for the first time cannot know what moves me.
Louis J Halle
Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I held my breath and wished for that moment to last as long as it possibly could, because a waking dream is always more fleeting than a sleeping one.
Vikas Swarup
CodaPerhaps to love is to learnto walk through this world.To learn to be silentlike the oak and the linden of the fable.To learn to see.Your glance scattered seeds.It planted a tree. I talkbecause you shake its leaves.
Octavio Paz
Don't waste time making enemies. As long as you're active, you'll have plenty.
George Hammond
I HAVE been around at a time when important things needed to be done
Paul H. Nitze
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I am yet to meet the idiot at whose door success arrived as a direct result of his refusal to invest in the enterprise that made him rich.
Jonathan Wutawunashe
By God, if women had written stories,As clerks had within here oratories,They would have written of men more wickednessThan all the mark of Adam may redress.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
Niccolò Machiavelli
My old friend, what are you looking for?After years abroad you’ve come backwith images you’ve nourishedunder foreign skiesfar from you own country.’‘I’m looking for my old garden;the trees come to my waistand the hills resemble terracesyet as a childI used to play on the grassunder great shadowsand I would run for hoursbreathless over the slopes.’‘My old friend, rest,you’ll get used to it little by little;together we will climbthe paths you once knew,we will sit togetherunder the plane trees’ dome.They’ll come back to you little by little,your garden and your slopes.’‘I’m looking for my old house,the tall windowsdarkened by ivy;I’m looking for the ancient columnknown to sailors.How can I get into this coop?The roof comes to my shouldersand however far I lookI see men on their kneesas though saying their prayers.’‘My old friend, don’t you hear me?You’ll get used to it little by little.Your house is the one you seeand soon friends and relativeswill come knocking at the doorto welcome you back tenderly.’‘Why is your voice so distant?Raise your head a littleso that I understand you.As you speak you growgradually smalleras though you’re sinking into the ground.’‘My old friend, stop a moment and think:you’ll get used to it little by little.Your nostalgia has createda non-existent country, with lawsalien to earth and man.’‘Now I can’t hear a sound.My last friend has sunk.Strange how from time to timethey level everything down.Here a thousand scythe-bearing chariots go pastand mow everything down
Giorgos Seferis
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart
Eleanor Roosevelt
He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving