Quotes by Diplomats - Page 14

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
John Kenneth Galbraith
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration.
Albert Cohen
You gain strength courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I love you like the plant that does not bloomand carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,
Pablo Neruda
With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beautyHolding the leash of bloodSo that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surfIn aromatic loam, or in sea musicBeautiful nudeEqually beautiful your feetArched by primeval tap of wind or soundYour ears, small shellsOf the splendid American seaYour breasts of level plentitudeFulfilled by living lightYour flying eyelids of wheatRevealing or enclosingThe two deep countries of your eyesThe line your shoulders have divided into pale regionsLoses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns ofBurnished goldFine alabasterTo sink into the two grapes of your feetWhere your twin symmetrical tree burns again and risesFlowering fireOpen chandelierA swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materialsAgate?Quartz?Wheat?Did your body come together?Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remainedAstonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your bodyYet suffocate itselfSo much is clarity Taking its leave of youAs if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Pablo Neruda
Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.
Shashi Tharoor
It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The world became more aware that America-despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the "American dream"-is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social inequality, a cornucopian culture that worships materialism, a financial system given to greedy speculation, and a polarized political system
Zbigniew Brzeziński
To be agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you already know.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
With her courage and determination, Malala has shown what terrorists fear most: a girl with a book.
Ban Ki-Moon
better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsin love with their likeness, better to eatthe poisoned bread, adultery on a bedof ashes, ferocious love, the poisonousvines of delirium, the sodomite who wearsa gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,better to be stoned in the plaza than to turnthe mill that squeezes out the juice of life,that turns eternity into empty hours,minutes into prisons, and time intocopper coins and abstract shit
Octavio Paz
Only one person in 1000 is a bore, and HE is interesting because he is one person in 1000.
Harold Nicolson
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.
James Weldon Johnson
You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Pablo Neruda
I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility
Eleanor Roosevelt
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
John Kenneth Galbraith
If we can widen the range of experiences beyond what we as individuals have encountered, if we can draw upon the experiences of others who've had to confront comparable situations in the past, then - although there are no guarantees - our chances of acting wisely should increase proportionately.
Edward Hallett Carr
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Pablo Neruda
If a man didn't make sense the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.
J. K. Galbraith
Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that's why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.
Pablo Neruda
In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.
Nikita Ivanovich Panin
Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.
Washington Irving
The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.
Muhammad Asad
There is only two types of women in the world:1. beautiful2. very beautiful
Gauri Shankar Gupta
The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Talleyrand
If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.
Pablo Neruda
90% of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger
Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we’d do, where we’d do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she’d become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She’s a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn’t all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn’t even seem to miss it. I did.
Shashi Tharoor
So many ruins bear witness to good intentions which went astray, good intentions unenlightened by any glimmer of wisdom. To bring religion to the people is a fine and necessary undertaking, but this is not a situation in which the proposed end can be said to justify the means. The further people have drifted from the truth, the greater is the temptation to water down the truth, glossing over its less palatable aspects and, in short, allowing a policy of compromise to become one of adulteration. In this way it is hoped that the common man – if he can be found – will be encouraged to find a small corner in his busy life for religion without having to change his ways or to grapple with disturbing thoughts. It is a forlorn hope. Standing, as it were, at the pavement’s edge with his tray of goods, the priest reduces the price until he is offering his wares for nothing: divine judgement is a myth, hell a wicked superstition, prayer less important than decent behaviour, and God himself dispensable in the last resort; and still the passers-by go their way, sorry over having to ignore such a nice man but with more important matters demanding their attention. And yet these matters with which they are most urgently concerned are, for so many of them, quicksands in which they feel themselves trapped. Had they been offered a real alternative, a rock firm-planted from the beginning of time, they might have been prepared to pay a high price.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Eleanor Roosevelt
When you approach a problem strip yourself of preconceived opinions and prejudice assemble and learn the facts of the situation make the decision which seems to you to be the most honest and then stick to it.
Chester Bowles
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.
Inazo Nitobe
The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda
Freedom is not for the timid.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Freedom works.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
History is a better guide than good intentions.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.
John Adams
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command
Niccolò Machiavelli
To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.
John Quincy Adams
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.
Dag Hammarskjöld
His guilt swelled up, churning like a paddle wheel in his stomach. He wanted desperately to flee. How do you escape something that comes from inside? The revenant, he knew, searched for him.
Michael Punke
So many come to the sickroom thinking of themselves as men of science fighting disease and not as healers with a little knowledge helping nature to get a sick man well.
Sir Auckland Geddes
People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they'll join your side.
Condoleezza Rice
What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them – that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.
Ann Bridge
... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...
Niccolò Machiavelli
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him there is always work And tools to work withal for those who will And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
James Russell Lowell
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as
John Adams
Fear is secured by a dread of punishment.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Life...is like the chameleon, changing colour all the time.
Ferdinand Oyono
When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
Dag Hammarskjöld
I could not at any age be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never for whatever reason turn his back on life.
Eleanor Roosevelt