Quotes by Diplomats - Page 9

To those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual,or transgender-let me say- you are not alone. You're struggle, for the end to violence and discrimination, is a shared struggle. Today, I stand with you. And I call upon all countries and people, to stand with you too.A historic shift is underway. We must tackle the violence, decriminalize consensual same sex relationships and end discrimination. We must educate the public. I call on this council and people of conscience to make this happen.The time has come.
Ban Ki-Moon
American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson
The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Doesn't everyone sell his soul? I tell you, sir: the devil does not exist, there is no devil, yet I sold him my soul. That is what I am afraid of. To whom did I sell it? That is what I am afraid of, my dear sir: we sell our souls, only there is no buyer.
João Guimarães Rosa
Meeting a dragon is like falling in love. Even though you have never experienced it before, you will know when it has happened.
Bill Richardson
Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.
Pablo Neruda
Hounds follow those who feed them.
Otto von Bismarck
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them, and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?
Eleanor Roosevelt
How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him, and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.
Washington Irving
It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
Niccolò Machiavelli
No! no! My engagement is with no bride--the worms! the worms expect me! I am a dead man--I have been slain by robbers--my body lies at Wurtzburg--at midnight I am to be buried--the grave is waiting for me--I must keep my appointment!
Washington Irving
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
James Weldon Johnson
I learned about lifefrom life itself,love I learned in a single kissand could teach no one anythingexcept that I have livedwith something in common among men.
Pablo Neruda
People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they'll join your side.
Condoleezza Rice
...no one can afford not to be a man. No position can compensate for coming face to face with a robot when you are alone.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one's world.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.
Pablo Neruda
Your eyes have the colour of the moon,
Pablo Neruda
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. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
John Adams
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
John Kenneth Galbraith
Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.
Washington Irving
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
Salvador de Madariaga
at Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Only one person in 1000 is a bore, and HE is interesting because he is one person in 1000.
Harold Nicolson
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
John Adams
I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
His guilt swelled up, churning like a paddle wheel in his stomach. He wanted desperately to flee. How do you escape something that comes from inside? The revenant, he knew, searched for him.
Michael Punke
Never do an enemy a small injury.
Niccolò Machiavelli
People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain; and while you benefit them, they are entirely yours, offering you their blood, their goods, their life, their children,...when need is far away, but when you actually become needy, they turn away. (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
Niccolò Machiavelli
In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.
John Quincy Adams
Life...is like the chameleon, changing colour all the time.
Ferdinand Oyono
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
Eleanor Roosevelt
One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one is trying to achieve.
Paul Nitze
Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.
T.E. Lawrence
Cecil: “A cup of love is greater than a pitcher full of ambition.
William Carmichael
And what physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Romanticism is the expression of man’s urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion.
Charles Yost
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
T.E. Lawrence
... When Princes devote themselves rather to pleasure than to arms, they lose their dominions.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... War is the sole art looked for in one who rules...
Niccolò Machiavelli
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.("The Blue Bouquet")
Octavio Paz
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.
Octavio Paz
The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.
Octavio Paz
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables.
Pablo Neruda
Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better.
Susan Rice
The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.
Dag Hammarskjöld
The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Then the shit hit the fan.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
John Kenneth Galbraith
That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
John Kenneth Galbraith