Quotes by Diplomats - Page 4

Friendship cannot live with ceremony nor without civility.

Lord Halifax

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

Nicholas Murray Butler

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

We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor

Benjamin Netanyahu

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

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

What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything himself.

Niccolò Machiavelli

When I was fourteen I was the oldest I ever was. ... I've been getting younger ever since.

Shirley Temple Black

... 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

Know something about something. Don't just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

Richard Holbrooke

Professional Ketman is reasoned thus: since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind.

Czesław Miłosz

LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreLI want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

Pablo Neruda

We must not seek happiness in peace but in conflict.

Paul Claudel

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!

James Russell Lowell

A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Patrick Mendis

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

There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered

Octavio Paz

To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile!

Washington Irving

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

Is it better to be loved or feared?

Niccolò Machiavelli

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

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

To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.

Harold Nicolson

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

Eleanor Roosevelt

It's your life-but only if you make it so.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.

Pablo Neruda

It's not worthy of human beings to give up.

Alva Reimer Myrdal

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

John F. Kerry

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

Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this too shall pass!'

Eleanor Roosevelt

In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.

James Russell Lowell

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

Octavio Paz

Till the sun grows cold And the stars are old And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.

Bayard Taylor

Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed or exempt from danger.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Whose starboard eyeSaw chariot 'swing low'?

James Weldon Johnson

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.....

Pablo Neruda

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

[Government]is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.

Otto von Bismarck

Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?

Daniele Varè

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.

John Kenneth Galbraith

What you don't do can be a destructive force.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Life...is like the chameleon, changing colour all the time.

Ferdinand Oyono

Swim or sink live or die survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.

John Adams

-I love you, Lenny.-From the diaphragm.-What are you talking about?-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm.

Romain Gary

In this part of the story I am the one whodies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.

Pablo Neruda

Life turns on small choices.A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.A word spoken with the best intentions.Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero.

William Carmichael

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

John Quincy Adams

So long as Muslims continue looking towards Western civilization as the only force that could regenerate their own stagnant society, they destroy their self-confidence and, indirectly, support the Western assertion that Islam is a "spent force".

Muhammad Asad

The art of statemanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

This two-track plan of nationalism and development (in China) is a historically powerful weapon.

Patrick Mendis

Sometimes, a war saves people.

José Ramos-Horta

Only one person in 1000 is a bore, and HE is interesting because he is one person in 1000.

Harold Nicolson

Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

Nicholas Murray Butler

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

Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.

Tehyi Hsieh

Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.

Niccolò Machiavelli

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

The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.

Vikas Swarup

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

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