Quotes by Diplomats - Page 10

We must not seek happiness in peace but in conflict.
Paul Claudel
I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,I love you directly without problems or pride:I love you this way because I know no other way to love,
Pablo Neruda
A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.
Joseph de Maistre
The essence of America – that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.
Condoleezza Rice
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking - the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.
Henry Kissinger
It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.
Dag Hammarskjöld
With kisses your mouth taught memy lips came to know fire.
Pablo Neruda
because two bodies, naked and entwined,leap over time, they are invulnerable,nothing can touch them, they return to the source,there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,no yesterday, no names, the truth of twoin a single body, a single soul,oh total being...
Octavio Paz
So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.
Pablo Neruda
Love is a clash of lightnings
Pablo Neruda
Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight
Niccolò Machiavelli
Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart.
John Mroz
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad netstowards your oceanic eyes.There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,its arms turning like a drowning man's.I send out red signals across your absent eyesthat smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.You keep only darkness, my distant female,from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad netsto that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.The birds of night peck at the first starsthat flash like my soul when I love you.The night gallops on its shadowy mareshedding blue tassels over the land.
Pablo Neruda
Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.
Pablo Neruda
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.
Niccolò Machiavelli
life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away
Octavio Paz
It's every American's duty to support his government but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.
Thomas C. Mann
Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods.
Czesław Miłosz
To swallow gudgeons ere they're catch'd And count their chickens ere they're hatch'd.
Nicholas Murray Butler
I touched you and my life stopped
Pablo Neruda
Now the frosty stars are gone: I have watched them one by one Fading on the shores of Dawn. Round and full the glorious sun Walks with level step the spray Through his vestibule of Day.
Bayard Taylor
The time is ripe and rotten-ripe for change then let it come.
James Russell Lowell
..it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.
Niccolò Machiavelli
[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.
Andrew Dickson White
He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
A government of laws, and not of men.
John Adams
Outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness. This loveliness, indeed, is impressed upon the body in varying degrees as a token by which the soul can be recognized for what it is, just as with trees the beauty of the blossom testifies to the goodness of the fruit.
Baldassarre Castiglione
Good historians...have the future in their bones
Edward Hallett Carr
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Life turns on small choices.A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.A word spoken with the best intentions.Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero.
William Carmichael
I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
Washington Irving
[Government]is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.
Otto von Bismarck
I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.
Pablo Neruda
Today’s China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers.
Patrick Mendis
The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.
Nicholas Murray Butler
What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Remember Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but she did it backwards and in high heels.
Faith Whittlesey
Time goes by: reputation increases ability declines.
Dag Hammarskjöld
(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests.
Eça de Queirós
Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.
Joaquim Nabuco
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---.
Romain Gary
If American misjudgments and actions that evolved into human tragedies—i.e., racism, sexism, and other bigotries—are guiding lights, the Chinese leadership must ultimately yield its power to the sovereignty of its people.
Patrick Mendis
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.("The Blue Bouquet")
Octavio Paz
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
T.E. Lawrence
You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Do tears not yet spilledwait in small lakes?Or are they invisible riversthat run toward sadness?
Pablo Neruda
As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Joel Barlow
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
Dag Hammarskjöld
And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5
Niccolò Machiavelli
Let us watch well our beginnings and results will manage themselves.
Alexander Clark
The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.
Harold Nicolson
The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,
Samantha Power
There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history... [T]he detail of the formation of the American governments... may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven... it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses... Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.[A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, 1787]
John Adams
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
Dag Hammarskjöld
And what physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Again, a Prince should show himself a patron of merit, and should honour those who excel in every art. He ought accordingly to encourage his subjects by enabling them to pursue their callings, whether mercantile, agricultural, or any other, in security, so that this man shall not be deterred from beautifying his possessions from the apprehension that they may be taken from him, or that other refrain from opening a trade through fear of taxes; and he should provide rewards for those who desire so to employ themselves, and for all who are disposed in any way to add to the greatness of his City or State.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.
Dag Hammarskjöld
It’s well known that he who returns never left
Pablo Neruda