Quotes by Diplomats - Page 19

I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you
Pablo Neruda
I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
Eleanor Roosevelt
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
John Kenneth Galbraith
If they lacked the opportunity, the strength of their sprit would have been sapped; if they had lacked ability, the opportunity would have been wasted.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.
Washington Irving
Knowledge in the head and virtue in the heart, time devoted to study or business, instead of show and pleasure, are the way to be useful and consequently happy.
John Adams
Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience.
Otto von Bismarck
On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.
Shashi Tharoor
The whole history of the Canadian north can be divided into two periods - before and after the aeroplane.
Hugh Keenleyside
You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background
George F. Kennan
Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czesław Miłosz
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.
James Russell Lowell
You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
George W. Ball
Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't put his pants on.
Arthur K. Watson
The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
When we lift our hands in praise and worship, we break spiritual jars of perfume over Jesus. The fragrance of our praise fills the whole earth and touches the heart of God.
Dennis Ignatius
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.
Bill Richardson
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Romanticism is the expression of man’s urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion.
Charles Yost
There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse as I have found in traveling in a stagecoach it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving
If I am disobeying orders, I'd rather be with God against men than with men against God.
Aristides de Souza Mendes do Amaral e Abranches
Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.
Washington Irving
Negotiations with Iran, especially, will not be easy under any circumstances, but I suspect that they might be somewhat less difficult if the nuclear-weapon states could show that their requests are part of a broader effort to lead the world, including themselves, toward nuclear disarmament. Preventing further proliferation is essential, but it is not a recipe for success to preach to the rest of the world to stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable to their own security.
Hans Blix
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
T.E. Lawrence
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
John Adams
Necessity does the work of courage.
Nicholas Murray Butler
To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people
Niccolò Machiavelli
Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve.
Tehyi Hsieh
Did not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to concede one iota of loyalty to his daemon, obey with equal fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master, the State? His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack the day when a state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their consciences!
Inazo Nitobe
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
O black and unknown bards of long ago How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How in your darkness did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?
James Weldon Johnson
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.
Pablo Neruda
O visionary world condition strange Where naught abiding is but only change.
James Russell Lowell
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Pablo Neruda
There is a very great difference — is there not? — between the temporal and the eternal judgments, a very great difference between a man's reputation and a man's character, for reputation is what men think and say of us, while character is what God and the angels know of us.
Price Collier
From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other, but because they are difficult to combine, it is far better to be loved than feared if you cannot be both.
Niccolò Machiavelli
...we must learn -once again- to regard Islam as the norm by which the world is to be judged.
Muhammad Asad
This formidable officine dates from Peter the Great, who formed it in 1697...its historic origins must, however, be looked for much earlier; one finds them in the byzantine traditions and in the operations of the Tartar domination...espionage, delation, torture, and secret executions were the normal and regulating instruments of the |||||||| police.
Maurice Paléologue
The present moment is significant not as the bridge between past and future but by reason of its contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours if we are capable of receiving them
Dag Hammarskjöld
... He who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new... partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Give me a half hour's conversation. I will know more than I will reading 20 magazines.
Joseph Kennedy
I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
T.E. Lawrence
First he wrought and afterwards he taught.
Geoffrey Chaucer
If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong.
John Quincy Adams
The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.
James Russell Lowell
Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.
Kofi Annan
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Pablo Neruda
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
The more underdeveloped the country the more overdeveloped the women.
J. K. Galbraith
I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I'm happy; happy that it's not true
Pablo Neruda
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
T.E. Lawrence
Any star can be devoured by human adoration, sparkle by sparkle.
Shirley Temple Black
It is hard for people to think clearly because their emotional needs keep getting in the way. The trick is to make thinking clearly an emotional need.
George Hammond
This was the penn'worth of his thought.
Nicholas Murray Butler
There is one thing only which a Muslim can profitably learn from the west, the exact sciences in their pure and applied form. Only natural sciences and mathematics should be taught in Muslim schools, while tuition of European philosophy, literature and history should lose the position of primacy which today it holds on the curriculum.
Muhammad Asad