Quotes About Diplomacy

And when Mrs Lincoln and others spoke harshly of the southern people, Lincoln replied: 'Don't criticise them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.

Nothing good can be accomplished and a lot of damage can be done if you tell a person straight out that he or she is wrong. You only succeed in stripping that person of self-dignity and make yourself an unwelcome part of any discussion.

In other words, don't argue with your customer or your spouse or your adversary. Don't tell them they are wrong, don't get them stirred up. Use a little diplomacy.

To recall a voter's name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion.

In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said that 'the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee.' 'And I will pay more for that ability,' said John D., 'than for any other under the sun.

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.

Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs," he wrote Weizmann in 1929, "then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.

Jobs's successes came at a cost, since velvety diplomacy was still not part of his repertoire. When he decided that a division of Airborne Express wasn't delivering spare parts quickly enough, he ordered an Apple manager to break the contract. When the manager protested that doing so could lead to a lawsuit, Jobs replied

Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies.

Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)

As a master of the relationship between power and diplomacy, Franklin knew that it would be impossible to win at the negotiating table what was unwinnable on the battlefield.

He combined two types of lenses to create bifocals and two concepts of representation to foster the nation's federal compromise.

There never was a good war or a bad peace."4

A democracy," Kennan wrote in a note to himself, "is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy.

He knew how to be impolite without being rude.

He tried to maintain a middle ground between those who were reflexively anti-American and those who were reflexively anti-Soviet.

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him." Instead, he would agree in parts and suggest his differences only indirectly.

reliable rule of diplomacy that you cannot win at the bargaining table something that you would be unable to win on the ground.

Kissinger once said of Israel's Moshe Dayan that he was "a brilliant manipulator of people and yet emotionally dependent on them.

Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength," Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger's guiding principles.

The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.

But Nimitz was very careful not to criticize Halsey in any way or to allow even a hint of controversy to enter the official records.

We can choose not to think about our power and its meaning for ourselves or for others, but we cannot make that power disappear and we cannot prevent decisions taken in the United States from rippling out beyond our borders and shaping the world that others live in and the choices that they make. Nor can we prevent the way that others see and react to our power from shaping the world we live in and affecting the safety and security of Americans at home.

he is not fit to visit strange countries, who cannot rule his tongue before his own countrymen