Quotes by Diplomats - Page 7

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
J. K. Galbraith
No-wher so bisy a man as he ter nas And yet he semed bisier that he was.
Geoffrey Chaucer
I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
J. K. Galbraith
Of course Canadians are different. There is no malice in us. We are the family doctor whom no one has called in for consultation. We are the children of the midday who see all in the clear shallow light.
Charles Ritchie
The situation is one something like living with your wife. Sometimes it is difficult and even irritating to live with her but it is always impossible to live without her.
Lester Pearson
The whole history of the Canadian north can be divided into two periods - before and after the aeroplane.
Hugh Keenleyside
I often feel like the director of a cemetery. I have a lot of people under me but nobody listens!
General John Gavin
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas M. Butler
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
James Russell Lowell
It is the beginning of the end.
Talleyrand
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
A degenerate nobleman or one that is proud of his birth is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
J. K. Galbraith
Nothing ever gets settled in this town (Washington). It's not like running a company or even a university. It's a seething debating society in which the debate never stops in which people never give up including me and that's the atmosphere in which you administer.
George P. Shultz
Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this too shall pass!'
Eleanor Roosevelt
Old age is the Outpatient's Dept of purgatory.
Lord Cecil
Time goes by: reputation increases ability declines.
Dag Hammarskjöld
But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age alias! that al wole envenyme Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon ther is namoore to telle The bren as I best kan now most I selle.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
J. K. Galbraith
Every time you meet a situation though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the torture of the damned once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Difficulties opposition criticism - these things are meant to be overcome and there is a special joy in facing them and in coming out on top. It is only when there is nothing but praise that life loses its charm and I begin to wonder what I should do about it.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Some minds seem almost to create themselves springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.
Washington Irving
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Make a virtue of necessity.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.
Dag Hammarskjöld
What one has to do usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.
John Adams
Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.
Eleanor Roosevelt
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
George F. Kennan
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.
Kofi Annan
Occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.
Hilary Clinton
... By disarming, you at once give offense, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...
Niccolò Machiavelli
You will fall with me as a stone in the grave
Pablo Neruda
On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.
Shashi Tharoor
Resorting to lying or cheating in any competition amounts to conceding defeat.
George Hammond
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
Otto von Bismarck
This two-track plan of nationalism and development (in China) is a historically powerful weapon.
Patrick Mendis
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking - the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.
Henry Kissinger
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Yale Richmond
Christie: “Even if he is – aren’t you the one who’s always saying we shouldn’t trust the wealthy, that they became that way by walking on the backs of the poor?
William Carmichael
Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.
Eleanor Roosevelt
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility
Eleanor Roosevelt
[...T]he ways of God have been manifested beyond example: the sea is divided, the cloud has led the way, the rock has poured forth water, it has rained manna, everything has contributed to your greatness; you ought to do the rest. God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything himself.
Niccolò Machiavelli
And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5
Niccolò Machiavelli
One of the great things about anarchy is that it’s hard to get it organized.
George Hammond
We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor
Benjamin Netanyahu
On Gandhi: Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.
Shashi Tharoor
Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.
Eleanor Roosevelt
So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.
Pablo Neruda
New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
James Weldon Johnson
The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.
Shashi Tharoor
An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.
Shashi Tharoor
And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn’t another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman’s shape but hides the faults a skirt can’t — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman’s hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn’t even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten.
Shashi Tharoor