Quotes by Diplomats - Page 5

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.
James Weldon Johnson
Let us put Germany so to speak in the saddle! you will see that she can ride.
Otto von Bismarck
Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine - no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.
Washington Irving
Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work — of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the “What am I?” Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.
Alexandre Kojève
Almighty Freedom! give my venturous songThe force, the charm that to thy voice belong;Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way,To nerve my country with the patriot lay,To teach all men where all their interest lies,How rulers may be just and nations wise:Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee.
Joel Barlow
A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.
Pablo Neruda
If ignorance is indeed bliss it is a very low grade of the article.
Tehyi Hsieh
Everything is recycled in India, even dreams.
Shashi Tharoor
This accidentalmeeting of possibilitiescalls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?And, at once, this Ibecomes unreal.
Dag Hammarskjöld
The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more imperative that America not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in self-righteous cultural hedonism
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!
Eça de Queirós
History is always a grand fantasy... To reconstruct is to invent.
Eça de Queirós
The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end:They are as dust before the wind.
Royall Tyler
By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness
Pablo Neruda
One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Life only demands from you the strength you possess.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph de Maistre
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
James Russell Lowell
Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Love.Because of you, in gardens of blossomingFlowers I ache from the perfumes of spring.I have forgotten your face, I no longerRemember your hands; how did your lipsFeel on mine?Because of you, I love the white statuesDrowsing in the parks, the white statues thatHave neither voice nor sight.I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;I have forgotten your eyes.Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound toMy vague memory of you. I live with painThat is like a wound; if you touch me, you willMake to me an irreperable harm.Your caresses enfold me, like climbingVines on melancholy walls.I have forgotten your love, yet I seem toGlimpse you in every window.Because of you, the heady perfumes ofSummer pain me; because of you, I againSeek out the signs that precipitate desires:Shooting stars, falling objects.
Pablo Neruda
you are the cause by which I die
Geoffrey Chaucer
Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
Washington Irving
Politics is not an exact science.
Otto von Bismarck
Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.
Henry Kissinger
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Yet it wasn’t the Mississippi River that captured Jim Bridger’s imagination : it was the Missouri. A mere six likes from his ferry the two great rivers joined as one, the wild waters of the frontier pouring into the bromide current of the everyday. It was the confluence of old and new, known and unknown, civilization and wilderness. Bridger lived for the rare moments when the fur traders and voyageurs tied their sleek Mackinaws at the ferry landing, sometimes even camping for the night. He marveled at their tales of savage Indians, teeming game, forever plains, and soaring mountains.The frontier for Bridger became an aching presence that he could feel, but could not define, a magnetic force pulling him inexorably toward something that he had heard about, but never seen. A preacher on a swaybacked mule rode Bridger’s ferry one day. He asked Bridger if he knew God’s mission for him in life. Without pause Bridger answered, “Go to the Rockies”. The preacher was elated, urging the boy to consider missionary work with the savages. Bridger had no interest in bringing Jesus to the Indians, but the conversation stuck with him. The boy came to believe that going west was more than just a fancy for someplace new. He came to see it as a part of his soul, a missing piece that could only be made whole on some far-off mountain or plain.
Michael Punke
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
James Russell Lowell
I want you to knowone thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs 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 arms without leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda
Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.
Dag Hammarskjöld
I know that my singing doesn’t make the moon rise, nor does it make the stars shine. But without my song, the night would seem empty and incomplete. There is more to daybreak than light, just as there is more to nighttime than darkness.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Instead of the final judgement, what worries me is the final dream.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.
Romain Gary
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry Kissinger
When I was fourteen I was the oldest I ever was. ... I've been getting younger ever since.
Shirley Temple Black
Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
Joseph de Maistre
Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.
Tehyi Hsieh
Tax is not a four-letter word; rather, it's the price we pay for the country we want.
Alex Himelfarb
The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.
Robert Strauss
To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.
Harold Nicolson
A samurai was essentially a man of action.
Inazo Nitobe
Everything is language.
Octavio Paz
you will not be master of my body & my property
Geoffrey Chaucer
Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.
Octavio Paz
Life has got to be lived-that's all that there is to it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If you are scared to go to the brink you are lost.
John Foster Dulles
Criticism ... makes very little dent upon me unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness... & ... Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.–
John Kenneth Galbraith
The best government is that which governs least.
John L. O'Sullivan
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
Geoffrey Chaucer
Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.
Eleanor Roosevelt
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
John Adams
His moral lectureblazed with hate.What could have driven a child that far?
Dag Hammarskjöld
Make a virtue of necessity.
Geoffrey Chaucer
In conclusion, the arms of others either fall from your back, or they weigh you down, or they bind you fast.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.
Niccolò Machiavelli