Quotes by Diplomats - Page 8

The only menace is inertia.
Saint John Perse
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.
Pablo Neruda
Pardon not wrath is God's best attribute.
Bayard Taylor
I love thee, I love but theeWith a love that shall not dieTill the sun grows cold,And the stars grow old
Bayard Taylor
Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.
Otto von Bismarck
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Lester B. Pearson
Like wind-- In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.Like light-- In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.Like wind. Like light.Just this--on these expanses, on these heights.
Dag Hammarskjöld
The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.
Shashi Tharoor
Cecil: “A cup of love is greater than a pitcher full of ambition.
William Carmichael
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
Pablo Neruda
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I love the piece of earth you are,because in all the planetary prairiesI do not have another star. You repeatthe multiplication of the universe.
Pablo Neruda
Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - 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 and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.
Octavio Paz
Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas?How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?
Pablo Neruda
On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!
Washington Irving
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
Jean Giraudoux
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Every time you meet a situation though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the torture of the damned once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.
Eleanor Roosevelt
This I know. This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and peaceful world if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being-we can do it!
Eleanor Roosevelt
More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that is why we have the United Nations.
Kofi Annan
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation hard work learning from failure.
General Colin L. Powell
If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie
Czesław Miłosz
Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.
Pablo Neruda
When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.
Dag Hammarskjöld
There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Washington Irving
Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.
Otto von Bismarck
More people are ruined by victory I imagine than by defeat.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Instead, we try to give them affection, confidence and guidance, more or less in that order, because experience has shown us that those are their most immediate needs.
E.R. Braithwaite
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Pablo Neruda
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
Dag Hammarskjöld
[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.
Zbigniew Brzeziński
History is simply a piece of paper covered with print the main thing is still to make history not to write it.
Otto von Bismarck
Let us be of good cheer remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russell Lowell
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
John Adams
Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams
Men in general are as much affected by what a thing appears to be as by what it is, indeed they are frequently influenced more by appearances than by reality.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair
Pablo Neruda
Don't go far off, not even for a day,because I don't know how to say it - a day is longand I will be waiting for you, as inan empty station when the trains areparked off somewhere else, asleep.Don't leave me, even for an hour, because thenthe little drops of anguish will all run together,the smoke that roams looking for a home will driftinto me, choking my lost heart.Oh, may your silhouette never dissolveon the beach, may your eyelids never flutterinto the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me fora second, my dearest, because in that moment you'llhave gone so far I'll wander mazilyover all the earth, asking, will youcome back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Pablo Neruda
Had I been chosen president again I am certain I could not have lived another year.
John Adams
I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes
Pablo Neruda
We have to make these young people (of the Depression) feel that they are necessary. (They should be given) "certain things for which youth craves – the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If one is cruel to himself how can we expect him to be compassionate with others?
Hasdai Ibn Shaprut
earn what you can since everything's for sale
Geoffrey Chaucer
Let us be of good cheer however remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell
I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy geography natural history and naval architecture navigation commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting poetry music architecture statuary tapestry and porcelain.
John Adams
Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
Pablo Neruda
I believe in the gods. Or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us I believe they are completely absent-minded.
Jean Giraudoux
The spirit of the way is surely there, in the wish to wander through the world in order to escape it and to find others where there is nobody.
Jean-Christophe Rufin
The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.
Sir Henry Wotton
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories.
John Adams
Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
James Russell Lowell
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary