Diplomacy Quotes

Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.

Warren W. Wiersbe

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.

Charles de Gaulle

Foreign diplomats in Rome disconsolately say, Italy is the opposite of Russia. In Moscow nothing is known, yet everything is clear. In Rome everything is public, there are no secrets, everybody talks, things are at times flamboyantly enacted, yet one understands nothing.

Luigi Barzini

The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There is, in world affairs, a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.

Dwight D Eisenhower

Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.

Dean Acheson

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

George Eliot

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

John D. Rockefeller

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

David Lloyd George

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either rods or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass

We are the greatest power in the world. If we behave like it.

Walt W. Rostow

If you are to stand up for your Government you must be able to stand up to your Government.

Lord Harold Caccia

British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.

Christopher Hitchens

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Barbara Tuchman

Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries.

Sir Henry Wotton

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way.

Daniele Vare

We have no commission from God to police the world.

Benjamin Harrison

The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy - give one and take ten

Mark Twain

A diplomat these days in nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

Peter Ustinov

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

Walter Bagehot