Quotes About Diplomacy

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

Many in the West seem to believe that "perpetual peace" among the great powers is finally at hand.

The limitation upon this mode of promoting peace lies in the fact that it consists in an appeal to the civilized side of man, while war is the product of forces proceeding from man's original savage nature.

In politics you learn to always smile.

Diplomacy amounts to nothing; it all comes down to blood and iron in the end." "Don't misquote Bismark at me.

Even races as belligerent as my own had come around eventually.

Vincent Katherinessen, the Old Earth Colonial Coalition's velvet-gloved iron hand, for too field-effective to the categorized as a mere diplomatic envoy no matter how his passport was coded.

Sometimes a thing can be true, and not for immediate sharing. That was, Connla had assured me more than once, how diplomacy worked.

With its growing economic and political power, China increasingly takes advantage of the political and economic openness of other countries while not providing these countries with the same opportunities to engage within China.

Remember to say what you mean, but don't say it meanly.

That's always the question. How to defend yourself without being nasty.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.

The first condition of success for the League of Nations is, therefore, a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them.

Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.

In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.

Of course Your Excellency will deny this story," Hale blurted out. Zimmermann turned to him. "I cannot deny it," he replied glumly; "it is true."23

for the Germans, this moment was exactly what they had been hoping for. Their master plan to send Lenin to Petrograd to take Russia out of the war was paying off even better than they had imagined.

In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' "31

Wilson was raising America up as the new global colossus based on its moral authority as a universal nation.

now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.

The United States (in the person of Wilson) was now in the habit of dictating unilaterally what happened in the world without asking anyone's consent, and then letting its Allies catch up.

The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.