Quotes by Diplomats - Page 17

The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly
Pablo Neruda
Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.
Otto von Bismarck
History proves beyond any possibility of doubt that no religion has ever given a stimulus to scientific progress comparable to that of Islam. The encouragement which learning and scientific research received from Islamic theology resulted in the splendid cultural achievements in the days of the Umayyads and Abbasids and the Arab rule in Sicily and Spain. I do not mention this in order that we might boast of those glorious memories at a time when the Islamic world has forsaken its own traditions and reverted to spiritual blindness and intellectual poverty. We have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realize that it was the negligence of the Muslims and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam that caused our present decay. Islam has never been a barrier to progress and science. It appreciates the intellectual activities of man to such a degree as to place him above the angels. No other religion ever went so far in asserting the dominance of reason and, consequently, of learning, above all other manifestations of human life.
Muhammad Asad
Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872
Otto von Bismarck
The past is the best way to suppose what may come.
Lord Halifax
Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams
...no one can afford not to be a man. No position can compensate for coming face to face with a robot when you are alone.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.
Eleanor Roosevelt
... War is the sole art looked for in one who rules...
Niccolò Machiavelli
Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom security and the enjoyment of opportunity.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
I love you in order to begin loving you,to start infinity againand never to stop loving you:that is why I do not love you yet.
Pablo Neruda
We needed no Shakespeare to feel -- though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it.
Inazo Nitobe
A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I find no peace, and all my war is done,I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice;I fly above the wind yet can I not arise;And naught I have and all the world I seize on.That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison,And holdeth me not, yet can I scape nowise;Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,And yet of death it giveth none occasion.Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain;I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;I love another, and thus I hate myself;I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.Likewise displeaseth me both death and lifeAnd my delight is causer of this strife.
Thomas Wyatt
An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too and that maketh him very wary.
Lord Halifax
Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.
Dag Hammarskjöld
The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.
Pablo Neruda
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)
Andrew Young
To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government."Study on Sovereignty.
Joseph de Maistre
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step; sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars, and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.
Pablo Neruda
Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis
The Chinese construction of South Asia’s tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing’s Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise.
Patrick Mendis
The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities.
John Foster Dulles
The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.
John Adams
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God
Henry Kissinger
There are many who think a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Pablo Neruda
A man must...not be content to do things well, but must also aim to do them gracefully.
Giovanni della Casa
Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadowswhere you accompany me in your dreamsand tell me the hour of light.
Pablo Neruda
A torch-light procession marching down your throat.
John L. O'Sullivan
The strongest pressure in the world can be friendly pressure.
Lester Pearson
All of life is a constant education.
Eleanor Roosevelt
India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.
Shashi Tharoor
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
Pablo Neruda
Our belief ultimately determines our faith.
Kenneth Newry
I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency it will be okay.
Henry Kissinger
It is a destiny of a woman to suffer in silence.
Vikas Swarup
People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis.
Jean Monnet
I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.
John Adams
A government of laws, and not of men
John Adams
Democratically-oriented Jeffersonian inspiration has prevailed throughout history and certainly been more admired than capitalistic Hamiltonian-style motivations of greed and power.
Patrick Mendis
LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreLI want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
Pablo Neruda
Dark is the world’s night without you my love,
Pablo Neruda
Darkness is strong and so is Sin But surely God endures forever!
James Russell Lowell
The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.
Henry Kissinger
The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood
Otto von Bismarck
I HAVE been around at a time when important things needed to be done
Paul H. Nitze
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
Octavio Paz
Falling in love is a series of moments in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Those moments are not continuous, but the sense of union with another person is just about the best thing there is.
Caroline Kennedy
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
J. K. Galbraith