Quotes by Diplomats - Page 9

Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed.
Vikas Swarup
None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.
John Kenneth Galbraith
It has often given my pleasure to observe, that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters form a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind them together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation of their various ties. With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give us this one connected country to one united people -a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by they their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
John Jay
As if you were on fire from within.The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Pablo Neruda
Revolutionary behavior and violence are usually only indulged in when people are at their wits’ end. So social stability depends a lot on how long their wits are.
George Hammond
You are the trembling of time, that passesbetween vertical light and darkened sky,
Pablo Neruda
People who believe that justice is a pendulum are willing to swing it wildly.
George Hammond
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.Do not take away the rose,the lance flower that you pluck,the water that suddenlybursts forth in joy,the sudden waveof silver born in you.My struggle is harsh and I come backwith eyes tiredat times from having seenthe unchanging earth,but when your laughter entersit rises to the sky seeking meand it opens for me allthe doors of life.My love, in the darkesthour your laughteropens, and if suddenlyyou see my blood stainingthe stones of the street,laugh, because your laughterwill be for my handslike a fresh sword.Next to the sea in the autumn,your laughter must raiseits foamy cascade,and in the spring, love,I want your laughter likethe flower I was waiting for,the blue flower, the roseof my echoing country.Laugh at the night,at the day, at the moon,laugh at the twistedstreets of the island,laugh at this clumsyfool who loves you,but when I openmy eyes and close them,when my steps go,when my steps return,deny me bread, air,light, spring,but never your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
The notion of burial had always struck him as stifling and cold. He liked the Indian way better, setting the bodies up high, as if passing them to the heavens.
Michael Punke
Every nation has the government that it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre
I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.
Pablo Neruda
...no one should marvel at the ease with which Alexander [the Great] kept possession of Asia, or at the difficulties which others, like Pyrrhus and many more, had in preserving their conquests. The difference does not arise from the greater or lesser ability of the conqueror, but from dissimilarities in the conquered lands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
A prince need take little account of conspiracies if the people are disposed in his favor.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait
Pablo Neruda
Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.
T.E. Lawrence
Who knows nothing base Fears nothing known.
Owen Meredith
Then love knew it was called love. And when I lifted my eyes to your name, suddenly your heart showed me my way
Pablo Neruda
He was the oldest. When we left Kentucky, our folks told him to look after me. Didn't say a word to me. Wouldn't have occurred to them.
Micheal Punke
He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Pablo Neruda
Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory.
John McNee
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
T.E. Lawrence
By God, if women had written stories,As clerks had within here oratories,They would have written of men more wickednessThan all the mark of Adam may redress.
Geoffrey Chaucer
China seems to have skillfully adapted a Monroe Doctrine, or “Ménluó” (a transliteration of the word “Monroe”) Doctrine, in America’s backyard.
Patrick Mendis
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
J. K. Galbraith
Y por que el sol es tan mal amigodel caminante en el desierto?Y por que el sol es tan simpaticoen el jardin del hospital?And why is the sun such a bad companionto the traveler in the desert?And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?
Pablo Neruda
Pride and weakness are Siamese twins.
James Russell Lowell
Don't waste time making enemies. As long as you're active, you'll have plenty.
George Hammond
The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.
Stéphane Hessel
Life is partly what we make it and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Tehyi Hsieh
People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.
Otto von Bismarck
One day with life and heart is more than time enough to find a world.
James Russell Lowell
if people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to behave responsibly.
Carne Ross
If one has not been able to experience God by himself, one should allow himself to be guided by the experiences of others who have experienced Him
Muhammad Asad
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.
Czesław Miłosz
(The great questions of the day) are not decided by speeches and majority votes but by blood and iron.
Otto von Bismarck
You shall create beauty not to excite the sensesbut to give sustenance to the soul.
Gabriela Mistral
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.
John Adams
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
John Kenneth Galbraith
I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.
Pablo Neruda
You are like nobody since I love you.
Pablo Neruda
The difficult is what takes a little time. The impossible is what takes a little longer.
Fridtjof Nansen
The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself.
Daniele Varè
The bright side of the planet moves toward darknessAnd the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,And for me, now as then, it is too much.There is too much world.
Czesław Miłosz
Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Nothing ever gets settled in this town (Washington). It's not like running a company or even a university. It's a seething debating society in which the debate never stops in which people never give up including me and that's the atmosphere in which you administer.
George P. Shultz
The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
Change means the unknown.
Eleanor Roosevelt
And after winter folweth grene May.
Geoffrey Chaucer
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
George F. Kennan
In creating the only hard thing's to begin
James Russell Lowell
On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.
Salvador de Madariaga
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide ... And the choice goes by forever t'wixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
His spirit chaunged house and wente ther,As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher.
Geoffrey Chaucer