Quotes by Diplomats - Page 3

One has to handle these negative experiences alone. You can't get help from your friends or family. You're finally alone with it and you have to come to grips with misfortune and go on.
Shirley Temple Black
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry Kissinger
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Pablo Neruda
A minority group has 'arrived' only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.
Carl T. Rowan
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
Salvador de Madariaga
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Kofi Annan
From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
Niccolò Machiavelli
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
John Kenneth Galbraith
my beauty, flower by flower, star by star,wave by wave, love, I have counted your body.
Pablo Neruda
I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.
Pablo Neruda
A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Patrick Mendis
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Yale Richmond
When you have decided what you believe what you feel must be done have the courage to stand alone and be counted.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...it's fat women who are really beautiful. The fatter the better.
Antonio Olinto
...so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Good-humor is goodness and wisdom combined.
Owen Meredith
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry Kissinger
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
Octavio Paz
There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation...is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral...that it is a duty and a virtue.
John Adams
Doesn't everyone sell his soul? I tell you, sir: the devil does not exist, there is no devil, yet I sold him my soul. That is what I am afraid of. To whom did I sell it? That is what I am afraid of, my dear sir: we sell our souls, only there is no buyer.
João Guimarães Rosa
...Defeat appears to me preferable to total Inaction.
John Adams
These opportunities, then, gave these men the chance they needed, and their great abilities made them recognize it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
Octavio Paz
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her,And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
Pablo Neruda
Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
Romain Gary
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
Pablo Neruda
I think at a child's birth if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift that gift should be curiosity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseperable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from - from ignorance, oppression, poverty - and freedom to - to do new things, to make choices, to learn.
Koichiro Matsuura
In the end it may well be that Britain will be more honoured by the historians for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.
David Ormsby Gore
To achieve the ultimate Confucian objective—a virtuous society—America has favored the rule of laws over Confucian-style virtues.
Patrick Mendis
How Forgiveness Helps Us Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again what is soiled is again made clean.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Of so much moon were your hips to me,of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,of so much burning light like honey in the shade
Pablo Neruda
Prudence which degenerates into timidity is very seldom the path to safety.
Viscount Cecil
There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
John Lothrop Motley
Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrowsloosens into the night the petals that form your formlet your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladderrung by rung taking off with me in my dream.I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows.Dark is the world’s night without you my love,
Pablo Neruda
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In life's small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscle trained Know'st thou when Fate Thy measure takes or when she'll say to thee "I find thee worthy do this deed for me?"
James Russell Lowell
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
Washington Irving
And I fear that my place gets taken by some other one, very lucky and not too shy, who flirts with your eyes while I’m the one who’s crazy about them.
Nizar Qabbani
Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Love brought its tail of pains,its long static beam of thorns,and we close our eyes so that nothing,so that no wound will separate us.
Pablo Neruda
You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.
Czesław Miłosz
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
Richard Holbrooke
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
Henry Kissinger
Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Washington Irving
All sciences have their mysteries and at certain points the apparently most obvious theory will be found in contradiction with experience. Politics, for example, offers several proofs of this truth. In theory, is anything more absurd than hereditary monarchy? We judge it by experience, but if government had never been heard of and we had to choose one, whoever would deliberate between hereditary and elective monarchy would be taken for a fool. Yet we know by experience that the first is, all things considered, the best that can be imagined, while the second is the worst. What arguments could not be amassed to establish that sovereignty comes from the people? However they all amount to nothing. Sovereignty is always taken, never given, and a second more profound theory subsequently discovers why this must be so. Who would not say the best political constitution is that which has been debated and drafted by statesmen perfectly acquainted with the national character, and who have foreseen every circumstance? Nevertheless nothing is more false. The best constituted people is the one that has the fewest written constitutional laws, and every written constitution is WORTHLESS.
Joseph de Maistre
America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
John Quincy Adams
... I believe that he will prosper most whose mode of acting best adapts itself to the character of the times; and conversely that he will be unprosperous, with whose mode of acting the times do not accord.
Niccolò Machiavelli
History is the archaeology of the present and future.
Patrick Mendis
we know little of the things for which we pray
Geoffrey Chaucer
No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The world is like a mirror frown at it and it frowns at you. Smile and it smiles too.
Herbert Samuel
The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person,for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
Czesław Miłosz
The king reigns but does not govern.
Otto von Bismarck
It is a secret in the Oxford sense. You may tell it to only one person at a time.
Oliver Franks
A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Henry Kissinger