Quotes About Diplomacy

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can't just pop off or lash out irrationally.

Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House.

I was never invited to the White House. They invited that Olympic Russian gymnast - that little Communist, Olga Korbut.

One thing is perfectly clear: We don't need another China crony in the White House!

President Trump should tell the Senate, 'No more admissions to NATO, no more U.S. war guarantees, unless I have recommended or approved them.' Foreign policy is made in the White House, not on the Senate floor.

What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.

Having a comic in the White House will assure stability in foreign relations. The world will continue to respond to foreign initiatives by saying, 'You must be joking.'

If there were things I felt the White House needed to be doing differently, I'd probably call them. I have a saying, and I had this in Michigan as chair, which is, 'We're a family.' When you have a difference of opinion in your family, you don't go on 'Jerry Springer'; you pick up the phone, and you call your family member.

Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?

During my years in the Navy and in the White House, I was involved in assessing how a war with Iran would go. In summary: It would be ugly.

I was at a White House Correspondents' Dinner, and I met Bobby Jindal, and we had a perfectly lovely twenty minute conversation.

The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.

And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

There's no way that I could be the president. You can't have a pacifist in the White House... I'm an actor. This is what I do for a living.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

I send messages to the White House continuously.

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good. But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House.

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn - the climax of a 'day of awe,' as the press described it.

I have known several presidents quite well, including my husband, and I worked closely with President George W. Bush and the White House then after 9/11, and I served with President Obama. I disagree with all three of those presidents on certain things.

In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times.

Cheney was among the best secretaries of defence the country has ever had. He was a very effective White House chief of staff. He did not make many enemies, and he had the ability to persuade people with that soft tone and very reasonable style of his. He's always been exceptionally good as the right-hand man.