Quotes About Diplomacy

Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.

Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. "He said, 'Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.' He laughed, and Russell said, 'Finnegan is a pro,' and that was it.

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.

Politics is not evil; politics is the human race's most magnificent achievement.

Mother had the social restraint of an ambassador.

But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who "cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat." If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don't understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one." "I'm not especially honest." "But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former.

cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat." If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don't understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.

Giving them room is often the better part of valor, especially when you're trying not to make things worse.

So. Ixnay on the direct approach.

Of course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. But a truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it.

The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa

The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.

This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29

Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.

Leave us alone and we'll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy.

simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship.

The foreign policies of every state are all unique because the characteristics and historical experience of each state are as well.

Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned

A Prince asked the dying spanish statesman, Does your Excellency forgive all your enemies? I do not have to forgive all my enemies, answered the stateman, I have had them all shot.