Quotes by Diplomats - Page 17

In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.
Henry Kissinger
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams
The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,
Samantha Power
Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight
Niccolò Machiavelli
In the end, everyone came to the conclusion that however ungainly, however inefficient, however elliptical ASEAN's ways are, it's still better than not having an ASEAN. That is the genius of ASEAN foreign policy.
George Yeo
The bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later.
Henry Kissinger
Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.
Kollontai Alexandra
Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated—indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us—I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible—as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy...
Niccolò Machiavelli
A prince ought to have two fears one from within on account of his subjects the other from without on account of external powers. From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies and if he is well armed he will have good friends and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy and even should affairs outside be disturbed if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said as long as he does not despair he will resist every attack.
Niccolò Machiavelli
If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls." Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk to Lord Halifax as reaction to announcement of allies' betrayal in 1938.
Jan Masaryk
...no one should marvel at the ease with which Alexander [the Great] kept possession of Asia, or at the difficulties which others, like Pyrrhus and many more, had in preserving their conquests. The difference does not arise from the greater or lesser ability of the conqueror, but from dissimilarities in the conquered lands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
There are many who think a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Negotiations with Iran, especially, will not be easy under any circumstances, but I suspect that they might be somewhat less difficult if the nuclear-weapon states could show that their requests are part of a broader effort to lead the world, including themselves, toward nuclear disarmament. Preventing further proliferation is essential, but it is not a recipe for success to preach to the rest of the world to stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable to their own security.
Hans Blix
For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.
Hans Blix
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Lester B. Pearson
It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.
Niccolò Machiavelli
No system that implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended any other way but collapse
William E. Dodd
Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The revolution in global communications thus forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty.
George Shultz
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
John Kenneth Galbraith
These opportunities, then, gave these men the chance they needed, and their great abilities made them recognize it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
[Government]is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.
Otto von Bismarck
We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Politicians are like dogs... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.
Otto von Bismarck
Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.
Otto von Bismarck
In conclusion, the arms of others either fall from your back, or they weigh you down, or they bind you fast.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
Otto von Bismarck
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice our local destination. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.
John Adams
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
John Adams
Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently, and for the same reason.
Eça de Queirós
Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.
Henry Kissinger
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command
Niccolò Machiavelli
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
Niccolò Machiavelli
-I love you, Lenny.-From the diaphragm.-What are you talking about?-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm.
Romain Gary
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple Black
Again, a Prince should show himself a patron of merit, and should honour those who excel in every art. He ought accordingly to encourage his subjects by enabling them to pursue their callings, whether mercantile, agricultural, or any other, in security, so that this man shall not be deterred from beautifying his possessions from the apprehension that they may be taken from him, or that other refrain from opening a trade through fear of taxes; and he should provide rewards for those who desire so to employ themselves, and for all who are disposed in any way to add to the greatness of his City or State.
Niccolò Machiavelli
...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---.
Romain Gary
...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.
Roger Casement
China has no choice but to emulate the power of America’s founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.
Patrick Mendis
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Gouverneur Morris
The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.
Stéphane Hessel
This “freedom” put a proud people in chainsAnd turned free men into slaves“Independence” made us weakAnd slaughtered usIn the name of kindnessThis is democracy by the whipAnd the fear of chainsWith a whirlwind at its core
Abdul Salam Zaeef
America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
John Quincy Adams
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.
John Adams
By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness
Pablo Neruda
Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!
Eça de Queirós
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
T.E. Lawrence
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
T.E. Lawrence
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
Sir Laurens van der Post
I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.
T.E. Lawrence
A siege is always a hospital - a hospital where mad thoughts abound and where mad things are done; where, under the stimulus of an unnatural excitement, new beings are evolved, beings who, while having the outward shape of their former selves, and, indeed, most of the old outward characteristics, are yet reborn in some subtle way and are no longer the same....The salt of life! Is it true, or is it merely a mistake, such as life-loving man naturally makes? For it can be nothing but the salt of death which has lain for a brief instant on the tongue of every soldier - a revolting salt which the soldier refuses to swallow and only is compelled to with strange cries and demon-like mutterings. Sometimes, poor mortal, all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defines analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden in the blood for many months and years. I believe it is a terrible thing....And yet even this nobody understands or cares to speak of... Englishmen are proud, and want to know if you were inside the British Legation, their Legation, and when they have heard yes or no their interest ceases. They little know what the Legation stood for. The Americans march up to the Tartar Wall, talk about "Uncle Sam's boys," and exclaim that it requires no guessing to tell who saved the Legations. The French are the same, so are the Germans, so even the Italians. Only the Japanese and the Russians say nothing....I am, therefore, tired of it all, inexpressibly tired. I wish to escape from my hospital, to go away to some clean land where they understand so little of such things that their indifference will in the end, perhaps, convince me and make me forget.Yet can one ever forget?
B.L. Putnam Weale
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.
José Ramos-Horta