Quotes from Richard Holbrooke

By the way, if you do your job on behalf of your country, you have meetings where you put your position forward strongly, and the other side does the same thing. And I've had plenty of meetings in my career that really were heated, people yelling at each other.

I have worked in every - every Democratic administration since the Kennedy administration, and I know dysfunctionality when I see it.

It's an improvisation on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you don't know how to get there. It's not linear.

In short, you can't let the deadline define the mission. The mission has to define the duration.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

The male elites that run most countries are exceedingly uncomfortable with the subject of AIDS because it's a sexually transmitted disease.

You will never catch up with the spread of AIDS no matter how much money, no matter how many antiretrovirals are put into the system, unless you stop its growth. And the only way to stop its growth is prevention.

People in uniform are not sacrosanct. They don't have all the answers. The use of force is a political decision at its core, in terms of its objectives; then the military, as the experts, must be brought in to tell you how to do it.

United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they're trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.

The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

I'm a product of the Kennedy era. Kennedy's Inaugural plus the accident of Dean Rusk brought me into the government. Those were my values.

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.

If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.

I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.

The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.