Diplomat Quotes

Michael Schumacher

Hirohito

Kofi Annan

Pope John XXIII

Pope Pius XII

Pope Pius IX

Pope Leo XIII

Judgment is more than skill. It sets forth on intellectual seas beyond the shores of hard indisputable factual information.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

There was no indication of panic. The broken files marched back in steady step. The effort was nobly made and failed from the blows that could not be fended.

James Longstreet

I think that people always just assumed that I was a liberal because I came from Southeast Seattle.

The so-called Al-Qaeda is, in my opinion, an illusion. It is a bunch of organizations which used to be supervised by the CIA, and used to commit crimes in some Arab and Islamic countries.

Riyad Naasan Agha

Democracy cannot be built on revenge and you will not have the support of the world if you are intolerant and take the law into your own hands.

Madeleine Albright

I now inform you that you are too far from reality.

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf

Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust, the ultimate abomination. Yet, we cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them

At the time this hazardous prophecy was made, the huge overgrown Roman Empire was tottering to its fall. Does a similar fate await the British Empire?

Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer

Of these no more. From Orders, Slaves and Kings,
To thee, O Man, my heart rebounding springs.
Behold th' ascending bliss that waits your call,
Heav'n's own bequest, the heritage of all.
Awake to wisdom, seize the proffer'd prize;
From shade to light, from grief to glory rise.
Freedom at last, with Reason in her train,
Extends o'er earth her everlasting reign…

Today we only smile, we laugh no more,
And e'en our very pleasures seem to bore.

François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis

Individual liberty is the whole purpose of political life, and I thought it was threatened then [in 1964 becoming politically engaged at age 15] and I think it's threatened now.

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

It seems as though he [Barack Obama]... has more of an interest, and more of a cultural capacity to reach out across the aisle in America, and to the world as a whole. As a wise man said once, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose...let's now see if he can deliver. Though I think he will soon find out that the vested interests of Washington are too stubborn for a relatively inexperienced politician such as himself to navigate.

I, according to my copy, have done set it in imprint, to the intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in those days.

We wanted the best, but it turned out like always.

Viktor Chernomyrdin

In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne.

Now in my opinion, out of all the countries I have personally known, England is the one where public affairs are best conducted and regulated with least violence to the people. There no buildings are knocked down or demolished through war, and disaster and misfortune befall those who make war.

Philippe de Commines

We have shown that socialism is an incoherent combination of thesis and antithesis, which contradict and destroy one another. Catholicism, on the contrary forms a great synthesis which includes all things in its unity, and infuses them in its sovereign harmony. It may be affirmed of Catholic dogmas, that, although they are diverse, they are one. Only an abolute negation can be opposed to this wonderful synthesis. The Catholic word is then invincible and eternal. Nothing can diminish its sovereign viture.

Juan Donoso Cortés

When I was in the military I always made it my first mission to burn the enemy's crops!

William J. Crowe

I scourge both flesh and spirit because I know that I have offended in both flesh and spirit.

I recommended that we establish contact with [the Chinese communists]. We had established contact through a military mission there but that we did not... we should not withdraw recognition from Chiang Kai-shek at that time, but we should recognize the inevitability of the loss, Chiang's loss to Mao, and that therefore we should, establish relations of the type that I described that we had with warlords, with the communists, and that we have, say, a consulate there, so that there was a political contact in addition to the military. That, of course, did not go down.

John Paton Davies, Jr.

Those who would see wonderful things must often be ready to travel alone.

We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security — and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.

Mohamed ElBaradei

Robert Spencer: Just ask all those secular republics in the Islamic world.

The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.