Best 176 quotes in «diplomacy quotes» category

Diplomacy is the art of recognizing all colors and knowing how to mix them up and bring them back as they were first.

Diplomacy never works.

Diplomacy in leadership is winning the war on behalf of both sides

Diplomacy is so weak and prosaic. Diplomacy must never become an end, itself. Facts are so much more important in science. Yet, I'm beginning to appreciate the value of a soft word and a smile. --Unassimilated pg 294

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.

Dinner was a comedy of diplomacy.

Diplomacy is the art of selling a deal you don’t want to people you don’t trust for reasons you won’t admit to.” -Prokopia Lekapene, first and only Hierarch of the League of Free Cities

Diplomatic exchange combined the worst aspects of explaining things to a toddler and talking with a mother-in-law. It was dull, it was tedious, it was exasperating, and it was necessary.

Diplomacy, if conducted sensibly, is a matter of small gains offset by small losses, an attempt to maintain a state of equilibrium in which catastrophes are either mitigated or, with luck, avoided entirely.

Diplomacy is the art of getting what you want without offending anyone too badly.

Diplomacy was created due to lack of trust between people. Trust is the fundamental force of attraction between people whereas diplomacy is the fundamental force of repulsion between people. Today, offsprings are taught diplomacy as the fundamental building block of a society instead of trust. As a result transparency of the society is lost and individuals in it are forced to trust double faced devils!

Diplomacy without sagacity and manoeuvre is like music with instruments.

Diplomacy is not a veiling of the truth. It is the ability to be sensitive to the truth.

Diplomacy is the egg of politics. One can eat that and benefit too.

Do not mix politics and diplomacy with love, nor try to test the love as an act of gambling, just feel with your purity of heart and soul that leads you towards the real beloved.

Do not talk of rights, else politics would start Scales would come out, haggling would start

His knowledge of war has fed a passion for peace.

He had come to prospect the intentions of Charles towards the French and the Anglo-Austrian coalition, and even if Charles had thrown his jack-boot at his head, it would not have disturbed him from his mission. Marlborough was a slow negotiator. He was never in a hurry to make propositions or ask questions, preferring under cover of a banal conversation to use his extremely acute faculties of observation, and his art of unraveling other men’s motives, as it were, sideways. The ablest diplomat will never boast of understanding a man, but only his intentions.

Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.

El orden que hoy está surgiendo deberán edificarlo estadistas que representan culturas sumamente distintas, que administran enormes burocracias de tal complejidad que, a menudo, la energía de estos estadistas se gasta más atendiendo a la maquinaria administrativa que definiendo un propósito. Estos estadistas han llegado a la cumbre del poder gracias a unas cualidades que no siempre son las necesarias para gobernar y aún son menos apropiadas para edificar un orden internacional.

History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.

How do you know... how do you know anything... US officials are making Maduro sounds like a corrupt, evil dictator... almost like a Stalin! Then the alternative voices (Thank God) are saying well they seem to like Maduro just fine over there... and since there must be nothing else to do in the world, US is just playing the old game of 'stop hitting yourself' let's do sanctions, and freeze your assets, and then... THEN LOOK MADURO'S STARVING HIS PEOPLE! Umm. Ya... no. I guess it really doesn't take a lotta brain to be a diplomat.

How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?

IF you draw a line in the sand you betray the loyalty of your cause

If the Republic of China, is going to move forward with their noble idea of making Sri Lanka a Shipping Hub, then the country must focus on eliminating corrupting bugs in the bed.

I knew nothing at all of the art of diplomacy, which I have since diagnosed as the ability to make the nastiest possible comment in the nicest possible way.

If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

In diplomacy there are two kinds of problems: small ones and large ones. The small ones will go away by themselves and the large ones you will not be able to do anything about. The biggest challenges in your career will come from the temptation to act. The test of your mettle will be how nobly you surmount it.

...il appartient aux services de sécurité, de toute nature, comme dans tous les pays, de participer à la défense du territoire national. Cette défense ne signifie pas de mettre des cartouches dans un fusil. De nos jours, il existe d'autres formes de cartouches. L'intelligence économique est beaucoup plus importante que l'intelligence militaire classique. Quand les marocains pénètrent dans toute l'Afrique, ils sont devenus plus puissants que les Algériens. Ici nous en sommes encore aux réflexes des années 1970 sans avoir l'aura de la diplomatie algérienne des années 1970.

In the movies you get even; in life, diplomacy is best.

In the lives of nations the really worthwhile things cannot and will not be hidden.

In this regard, we should never overlook the importance of being economically successful and militarily secure. Diplomacy is not a single-barrelled gun. While we should always uphold the principle of settling disputes peacefully through diplomacy and rule of law, we need to be mindful that in practice, the extent to which disputing parties are willing to come to the table depends on larger considerations including where they stand economically and militarily in relation to each other.

...it is a different matter entirely to commit military resources to keep peace in such areas, where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms - or even want them. The military need not do the work of sanctions and diplomacy. As we carry on in this new century, we would do well to remember the importance of balancing the twin goals of our foreign policy: preserving national security and promoting democratic principles. And we must remember that historic conflicts between enemies can be won on moral force, without firing a single bullet or missile; that cultural, market, political, and perhaps religious forces can be far more transformative in areas of the world where chaos and violence reign; and that America can contribute to the building of nations by any and all of these means - while preserving our military and reserving our sovereign right to wage war to maintain true peace.

I think there is a substantial difference between hypocrisy and diplomacy: hypocrisy is not saying things, diplomacy is knowing how to say things.

Real firmness is good for every thing—Strut is good for nothing.

It is easy for a double faced men to live in a society of double faces. Transparent individuals will definitely find it difficult to live in a diplomatic double faced society. Such individuals are often portrayed as anti-social. They are anti-social not because they are anti-social but because they are very social!

Louella remarked that when foreign nations had intercourse with this country they knew they had been intercoursed.

It's a time-honored truism of diplomacy that the most resented epithet is the one most accurately depicting the deficiencies of the recipient.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

It shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy.

One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go.

Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence.

Now is not the time to look at the past. Lets look forward to the future. Diplomats know very well that these are standard slogans for those who are engaged in serious crimes.

Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand? Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already? Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger. His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom? Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water. And heavier than fishes? Of course heavier than fishes. Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard. Father? It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade up to my ankles and pick them like squash. It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.

Nothing can be changed in the system when the system itself is revolting against those who opposed violence.

On the question of the machinery of government, we have seen that a good deal of our trouble seems to have stemmed from the extent to which the executive has felt itself beholden to the short-term trends of public opinion in the country and from what we might call the erratic and subjective nature of public reaction to foreign-policy questions. I would like to emphasize that I do not consider public reaction to foreign-policy questions to be erratic and undependable over the long term; but I think the record indicates that in the short term our public opinion, or what passes for public opinion in the thinking of official Washington, can be easily led astray into areas of emotionalism and subjectivity which make a poor and inadequate guide for national action.

Remember, there is no peace without peaceful exchange.

Peace is war by other means.