Quotes by Diplomats - Page 15

Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
John Adams
In one kiss, you'll know all I haven't said.
Pablo Neruda
The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.
T.E. Lawrence
How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years.
Shashi Tharoor
No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my election.
John Quincy Adams
Even if God had created us, He would never have admitted it.
George Hammond
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
Czesław Miłosz
The only menace is inertia.
St. John Perse
If You Forget MeI want you to knowone thing.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.Well, now,if little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving you little by little.If suddenlyyou forget medo not look for me,for I shall already have forgotten you.If you think it long and mad,the wind of bannersthat passes through my life,and you decideto leave me at the shoreof the heart where I have roots,rememberthat on that day,at that hour,I shall lift my armsand my roots will set offto seek another land.Butif each day,each hour,you feel that you are destined for mewith implacable sweetness,if each day a flowerclimbs up to your lips to seek me,ah my love, ah my own,in me all that fire is repeated,in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,my love feeds on your love, beloved,and as long as you live it will be in your armswithout leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda
While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.
Pablo Neruda
It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
Czesław Miłosz
Read Hearn, the most eloquent and truthful interpreter of the Japanese mind, and you see the working of that mind to be an example of the working of Bushido.
Inazo Nitobe
I often feel like the director of a cemetery. I have a lot of people under me but nobody listens!
General John Gavin
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.
Dag Hammarskjöld
When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.
Dag Hammarskjöld
A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
John Adams
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Dag Hammarskjöld
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith
people have managed to marry without arithmetic
Geoffrey Chaucer
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Pablo Neruda
We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it we have lived by it we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god and we ask no one else to bow down before it.
Carl T. Rowan
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
Dag Hammarskjöld
It is of the greatest important in this world that a man should know himself, and the measure of his own strength and means; and he who knows that he has not a genius for fighting must learn how to govern by the arts of peace.
Niccolò Machiavelli
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice our local destination. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.
John Adams
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The ultimate truth is that we are individuals who can choose to respect ourselves, and others, with or without regard to bloodline, wealth, tribe, or community.
Omar Saif Ghobash
Friendship cannot live with ceremony nor without civility.
Lord Halifax
flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.
Shashi Tharoor
In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.
Czesław Miłosz
A prince ought to have two fears one from within on account of his subjects the other from without on account of external powers. From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies and if he is well armed he will have good friends and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy and even should affairs outside be disturbed if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said as long as he does not despair he will resist every attack.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
James Weldon Johnson
Now your burnt ashes float to mingle with others And as I wait for another day I keep singing another song How did I go astray!
Lindiwe Mabuza
Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The main thing is to make history, not to write it
Otto von Bismarck
You can surmount the obstacles in your path if you are determined courageous and hardworking. ... Do not fear to pioneer to venture down new paths of endeavor.
Ralph J. Bunche
An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.
Shashi Tharoor
...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.
Roger Casement
We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions.
Dwight Morrow
...stories break silence and nourish those who work, feel, and dream.From Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion
Carmen Naranjo
No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done.
Kofi Annan
No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.
J. K. Galbraith
It was at that agethat poetry came in search of me.
Pablo Neruda
The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russell Lowell
...no matter how avid they themselves may be for praise and appreciation, people are often niggardly in giving it to others, however merited it is.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
John Quincy Adams
Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways-in science in politics in every bold intention. It is part of our collective lives entwining our past and our future ... a particularly rewarding aspect of life itself.
Shirley Temple Black
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Good luck needs no explanation.
Shirley Temple Black
You came to my lifewith what you were bringing,madeof light and bread and shadow I expected you,and Like this I need you,Like this I love you,and to those who want to hear tomorrowthat which I will not tell them, let them read it here,and let them back off today because it is earlyfor these arguments.
Pablo Neruda
The illegal we do immediately the unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the divinities, the values, the supreme aims served respectively by these three kinds of men with an undivided loyalty: truth for the scientist; beauty for the artist; goodness for the saint. The discussion on what these words mean will never end. We must be content with taking note of their clarity as symbols, and of the singular force which animates them and makes of them powerful poles of attraction.
Salvador de Madariaga
Benefits should be granted little by little so that they may be better enjoyed.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, 'that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
John Adams
Apes. The moon woke them--round the world's navel revolvedprayer wheels of steps.
Dag Hammarskjöld
I cannot quit your love without dying.
Pablo Neruda