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Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.
-Dean Acheson
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An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.
-Walter Bagehot
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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
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Consul. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
-Ambrose Bierce
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If you are to stand up for your Government you must be able to stand up to your Government.
-Lord Harold Caccia
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Diplomacy is the art of saying Nice doggie! till you can find a rock.
-Wynn Catlin
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I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I speak the truth, and they never believe me.
-Di Cavour
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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
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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
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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
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A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
-Robert Frost
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There are a few ironclad rules of diplomancy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.
-Charles De Gaulle
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Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.
-David Lloyd George
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Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.
-Isaac Goldberg
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We have no commission from God to police the world.
-Benjamin Harrison
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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
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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
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Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are to finishing it. You take Diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
-Will Rogers
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We are the greatest power in the world. If we behave like it.
-Walt W. Rostow
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My advice to any diplomat who wants to have a good press is to have two or three kids and a dog.
-Carl Rowan, "New Yorker"
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A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
-Caskie Stinnett
Out of the Red, "Random House"
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When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.
-Sun-Tzu
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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
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When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps; when he says perhaps he means no; when he says no he is no diplomat.
-Source Unknown
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Books about Diplomacy
