Quotes About Diplomacy

The fidelity of the United States to security treaties is not just an empty matter. It is a pillar of peace in the world.

We were eyeball-to-eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.

Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people.

Organizing a marriage is like forming a government after a war.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

but President Harding told Secretary of State Hughes, "Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion…"23

think one of the big lessons is that we should do more talking and less fighting.

Trust remains the coin of the realm in politics. A President who is trusted, by the people, by the congress, by the press, by foreign countries, is a President who can get a lot of good things done.

Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one's power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one's power has some basis other than their recognition.

from China's point of view, this is the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state.

the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches)

It was typical of Washington's style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone else's idea, rather than his own.

In 1947, Kennan wrote, "The men of the Kremlin would suddenly discover that this fluid and subtle oriental movement which they thought they held in the palm of their hand had quietly oozed away between their fingers and there was nothing left there but a ceremonial Chinese bow and a polite giggle.

the thirty-eighth parallel, selected by the Americans and the Russians back in 1945 as the dividing line between the two Koreas, as a border at all.

David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: "I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

The pope, aware that he had already angered Mussolini with his three telegrams, would do no more.

the Vatican's cooperation.

The two men spoke in German, although von Hessen, who had spent years living in Italy, could also speak Italian

how much he admired the pope's ability to craft his speeches in a way that ensured they would offend no one.

General Wu was about to say something and then thought better of it. Li walked him down the stairs to his car. As the door opened, Li leaned over and whispered in the general's ear: "I tolerate much from my brother. We are a family. Please don't ever do that again.

This was the beginning of Hitler's new-style diplomacy. His victories in Central Europe were won without the sword – they were won by power politics and opportunism, by bluff, by coercion, by psychological operations and by nerve-war. On each occasion he carefully gauged his potential enemies. He satisfied himself that the western powers would not fight, provided he made each claim sound reasonable enough. The west was weak and unready, and he was not.

It is a basic principle of Third Reich foreign policy only to tackle one thing at a time.

After showing them the blast furnaces, rolling mills and armour-plate works, Hitler and Ribbentrop took Mussolini alone into a hall where Krupp engineers took the tarpaulins off Hitler's proudest possession – a gun barrel so huge that it had to be transported on two parallel railroad tracks. Mussolini stroked it and congratulated the Führer, clearly astonished at the weapon's size.