Quotes About Balance

For centuries, the Middle Kingdom had assured its security by playing off distant barbarians against immediate neighbors. Deeply worried about Soviet expansionism, Mao adopted the same strategy in his opening to the United States.

The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. 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. The interwar years' toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.

yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.

Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today's leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

The logic of war is power, and power has no inherent limit. The logic of peace is proportion, and proportion implies limitation.

E veio demonstrar como mudanças internas podem abalar o equilíbrio internacional mais profundamente do que uma agressão externa – uma lição que seria aplicada pelas revoluções do século XX, muitas das quais beberam explicitamente dos conceitos originalmente avançados pela Revolução Francesa.

Não fizeram qualquer esforço para incluir a vizinha Rússia, que na época, findo o pesadelo de um «tempo de dificuldades», reconstruía a sua própria ordem consagrando princípios em clara contradição com o equilíbrio vestefaliano: um único soberano absoluto, uma ortodoxia religiosa unificada, e um programa de expansão territorial em todas as direções.

É que a visão americana assentava não na adoção do sistema europeu de equilíbrio de poder, mas na expansão dos princípios democráticos, de que resultaria o triunfo da paz.

um conjunto de regras de aceitação geral que define os limites de ação aceitáveis, e um equilíbrio de poder que impõe a contenção quando as regras são violadas, impedindo que determinada unidade política venha a subjugar as outras.

O mundo que despontava com a Guerra Fria ia assentar os seus equilíbrios na conduta e no armamento de duas superpotências: os Estados Unidos, além Atlântico, e a União Soviética

o equilíbrio de poder precisa de ser reavaliado de tempos a tempos. É ele que desencadeia as guerras cuja dimensão limita.

For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.

Ã…Ëœe?eno slovy Rooseveltova oblíbeného poÃ…â"¢ekadla, Amerika bude "mluvit tiÅ¡e a držet silnou h?l".

There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Surgeons must always tell the truth but rarely, if ever, deprive patients of all hope. It can be very difficult to find the balance between optimism and realism.

Love, I reminded my trainees, can be very selfish.

It is often said that it is better to leave too early rather than too late, whether it is your professional career, a party, or life itself.

The best is the enemy of the good,