Diplomat Quotes

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

It looks like business, and people are much pleased.

At Camp One we were met by Director of Public Works Warwick Greene, grim and grimy. He has been working himself to death to make this transportation plan a success.

If North Korea is allowed to maintain its nuclear weapons programs, other nations may well follow suit and some may buy such weapons from the North Koreans.

You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way.

Time and again these governments have rejected proposals today - and longed for them tomorrow.

The Jews are the living embodiment of the minority, the constant reminder of what duties societies owe their minorities, whoever they might be.

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

His ignorance is encyclopedic.

A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

Better to be disliked than pitied.

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals.

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

There's Hezbollah, there's Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there's a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets tha

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through - because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth - which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to t

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

The fact of the matter is that if we were going to do anything about Gaddafi, it should have been at the beginning. And by fooling around like this as long as we have, we have wasted an opportunity that would have gotten rid of him.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.